Boglands by Brian Jordan

BogLands The Future of Irish Boglands. A collaboration between Bord na M贸na and The Dublin School of Architecture.

Fifth Year Stuio 2011/12 Dublin School of Architecture, Dublin Institute of Technology. With support from: Bord na M贸na Contact: Dublin School of Architecture Linenhall, Henrietta Place, Bolton Street, Dublin 1, Ireland. Tel: +353 1 4023690 www.dublinschoolofarchitecture.com www.dit.ie Editors: Donnchadha Gallagher Brian Jordan Paul Maher ISBN: 978-0-9568502-5-6 漏Dublin School of Architecture Press. All rights reserved. All information presented in this publication is deemed to be the copyright of the creator or the Dublin School of Architecture, unless stated otherwise. Fair Dealing Notice: This publication contains some copyrighted material whose use has not been authorised by the copyright owners. We believe that this not-for-profit, educational publication constitutes a fair dealing of the copyrighted material.

Boglands

Contents Preface:

Donnchadha Gallagher, Brian Jordan, Paul Maher

Foreword:

Pat Ring, Head of Property Development, Bord na M贸na.

Introduction:

Dermot Boyd

Essay:

Dominic Stevens - Are Architects Screeching Hystericals?

Essay:

Kristen Klinefelter - Peatland Conservation

The BogLands of Ireland Formation of Peatlands Archaeology Mapping the Boglands Peat Industry in Ireland

16 20 24 26

BogLand Proposals Industry Essay: Ruin and the Uncanny, Paul Maher. Recreation Community Infrastructure Essay: Boundary and Freedom in Architecture, Olivia Hillery. Education and Research

32 62 68 88 104 126 138

Conclusion Essay:

154 Johanna Cleary - Ends, Means and Meanings.

Boglands

Preface

Donnchadha Gallagher, Brian Jordan, Paul Maher Editors

In collaboration with Bord na Móna, Final Year Dublin School of Architecture students explored alternative uses for Irish boglands and the future of these sites. The year focused on the opportunity to develop sustainable bog-based enterprises once the European Mandate to cease peat extraction is completely phased in. The research project was conducted through the lens of the Ethics and Aesthetics of Sustainability.

This publication represents the large body of research compiled during the year. The outcome was a wide range of innovative projects all aimed at dealing with a depleted landscape. The group’s intentions are to highlight the need for architects to get involved in pertinent societal issues such as these, which become part of the fabric that makes up the country’s built environment.

Boglands

Foreword

Pat Ring Head of Property Development, Bord na Móna

Bord na Móna was established in 1946 to develop some of Ireland’s extensive peat resources on an industrial scale primarily for fuel, energy and horticultural growing media. As part of this development, the company acquired extensive areas of peatlands, together with other lands and properties. These lands extend in total to about 80,000 hectares. Initially it was anticipated that when peatlands becomes cutaway or depleted, this vast land resource might be widely used for agriculture and forestry. However, following extensive trials and experiments, it is now clear that the future of the land lies in a wider mix of uses. The following are important issues to be considered when planning for future uses of industrial peatlands: - The role that peatlands can play in continuing to supply energy to the country, both through traditional fuels and renewables; - Their potential to meet national and regional land requirements for infrastructure and industry; - The benefits they can bring in terms of recreation and amenity; and - Their contribution to Ireland’s national biodiversity targets. Some of the land bank is now out of peat production and is used for a variety of purposes, including wind energy, forestry, tourism and amenity, industry, etc. Other uses are being planned, whilst a number of bogs with high biodiversity value have been handed over to the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

The peatlands of Bord na Móna will continue to be harvested to meet demands for energy and horticultural growing media. At the same time we need to plan for the future use of the remaining lands. This is a complex task and Bord na Móna recently completed a ‘Strategic Framework for the Future Use of Peatlands’. This work seeks to present the various issues and options for the future uses of Bord na Móna’s peatlands and includes a Land Use Review System to assist in decision making. The review process will also involve consultation with relevant interested parties, especially those involved in planning and the environment. We are very pleased to have assisted DIT’s Architectural students in their final year projects. The theme of the projects was to explore the opportunity to develop sustainable enterprise and uses from cutaway industrial peatlands which is consistent with Bord na Mona’s intent to generate commercial, social and environmental value from our cutaway peatlands. We congratulate the students on their work on the BogLands project. This publication contains a wide range of innovative ideas and concepts. We were impressed by their great interest and commitment to the project and wish them well in their future careers.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Introduction

The Destiny of the Landscape Dermot Boyd

5th year Yearmaster

The new study of architecture is a discovery of knowledge about existence. As design teaching, it is the song of songs of harmony. As social teaching, it is a strategy of balance. This study of building is not a study of style, it is not a constructivist system, nor is it the study of technological miracles. It clarifies equally the concerns of the physical, the psychological, the material and the economic. It explores, demarcates and orders the force fields of the individual, the family and society. Finally, all architectural design is subject to fate in the form of the landscape: as designers we fulfil the destiny of the landscape. (1) Hannes Meyer, Bauhaus and Society 1929.

Bogs are the liveliest elements in the European landscape, not just from the point of view of flora, fauna, birds and animals, but as storing places of life, mystery and chemical change, preservers of ancient history. They are essential to the whole eco-system for water regulation, humidity, ground water and climate in general. (2) Joesph Beuys, Acktion im Moor (Bog Action) 1971

As architects we must help fulfil the destiny of the landscape and we must use ethical, aesthetic and sustainable means to do so. As we are now living in the Anthropocene (a new geological epoch in which humans have altered the planet), the fate of the landscape rests in our hands. The architecture we propose here takes its form from a particular BOGlands landscape and its purpose from the economic, social and environmental forces that surround it. We wish to preserve the unique qualities of the Irish bog, mend an expansive postproductive landscape and explore appropriate enterprises that would help shape a new future for the Midlands of Ireland.

Bog is Irish for soft. These marshs or peatlands (bogach â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Irish) remain one of the most characteristic landscape features in Ireland. Bogland covers 16% of the Irish landmass, approximately 1.34 million hectares of the total land area of Ireland. (3) There are two types of bog, raised and blanket bog. Raised Bogs are located in the central lowlands and blanket bogs are primarily situated on the western seaboard. Raised Bog (the bogland type in our study) is formed by the constant layering or composting of wetland vegetation over thousands of years. It can be three to twelve metres in thickness in places. Over the millennia, there has been little human settlement in boglands of Ireland but this soft ground has provided a much needed energy resource for the local population through the cutting and drying of turf to be used as combustible fuel. It is this landscape that is the subject of our architectural study, a particular terrain that has been radically transformed through mechanised peat extraction methods introduced by Bord Na MĂłna over the last century. As architects we needed to introduce and accommodate new enterprise in the boglands which would

Essay Boglands

contribute to its sustainable regeneration as a scientific, cultural, economic, aesthetic and natural resource. It is nascent ground offering an unrivalled opportunity to re-imagine and re-configure our relationship with the landscape so we can fulfil its true destiny. Bord Na Móna was established in 1946, to support and promote a national self-sufficiency in energy production in Ireland. It remains a semi-state body which up to recently provided 49% of our indigenous energy requirements, through electricity production via milled peat extraction and the manufacture of peat briquettes. Bord Na Móna controls 80,000 hectares of bogland, making it the second largest landowner in the state. However in future years, the productive life of the raised bogs will come to an end. The burning of milled peat extraction will stop due to the limiting of CO2 emissions in the Kyoto Protocol and the lack of extractable resources available within Bord Na Móna’s ownership. This land has huge developable potential and in Bord Na Móna’s Strategic Framework for the future use of peatlands, there is a wish to balance and optimise the commercial, social and environmental value of the company’s land-bank (4). However, having undertaken extensive research over the years, trials by Bord Na Móna have proved that agriculture, horticulture and forestry have limited potential on depleted boglands. Bord Na Móna are presently exploring alternative ventures for the provision of large water reservoirs and wind farms married to a boglands preservation programme. We sought to find alternative solutions for this cutaway landscape in BOGlands. At our request, Bord Na Móna identified a typical area of bogland for the project. in the Midlands of Ireland. Derrygreenagh Bog is a raised bog located near Rochefortbridge in east Co Offaly, adjacent to the M6 motorway. It is cross-laced by an infrastructure of roads, light railway and waterways, Derrygreenagh accommodates active peat extraction, depleted bogs, gravel pits, concrete works, extensive forestry and slit ponds. There are large service sheds of Bord Na Móna’s Derrygreenagh Works built at

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

its centre, constructed to maintain the milling machinery, the locomotives and carriages of the narrow gauge railway which still links many of the Bord Na Móna sites in the area.

1. Bauhaus, Ed Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend Konnemann, Cologne, 1999, p564 2. Joseph Beuys as quoted by Caroline Tisdale, Joseph Beuys Solomon, Guggenheim Museum New York 1979, p39

Derrygreenagh becomes the main location for most of the innovative projects designed by the students in this book. Each project promotes enterprise and employment and each promotes a sustainable and strategic role in the Midlands region. Their origins recognise essential natural, social, cultural and economic needs of the area. For instance, projects of a particular social focus are Niamh Chamber’s proposal to grow and harvest indigenous bog plant life to provide the ingredients for the production of whiskey in a Collective Distillery, facilitating a social practice and local tradition; Bernard Brennan’s examination of place and continuity enables him to re-imagine the market house and town square at the heart of Edenderry so he can address the contemporary urban needs of a local county town through his project. Culturally, Anna Pierce seeks to establish a national observatory in a flat dark bog under the domed night sky over Derrygreenagh. The site of Olivia Hillary’s Goldsmiths School uncovers and preserves hidden ancient traditional settlements and precious fragments within the boglands; Brian Jordan analyses the temporality of the bogland landscape and its effect on the creation of stereotomic and tectonic space in architecture with his visiting centre; Grace Counihan’s innovation centre skilfully cuts into the bogland site so as to establish a new self contained community and Donnchadha Gallagher explores the historical culture of death, played out in these ancient bogland sites, preserving corpses in the acidic peatland soil of a new national burial ground. For an economic and sustainable future, Ronan Murray’s large reservoir feeds an ever- increasing need for water in the main urban centres of Ireland; James O’Toole’s incrementally constructed Nacelle Factory directly serve the immediate manufacturing needs of Bord Na Móna; Elaine Wynne in

3. Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape Ed FHA Aalen, Kevin Walsh and Mathew Stout, Cork University Press, Cork, 1997, p106 4. Suburban to SuperRural, Ed. Shane O’Toole, Gandon Editions, Kinsale 2006, p19 5. Strategic Framework for the future use of Peatlands, Bord Na Móna, Newbridge p3 p201

Joseph Beuys in Ireland 1974

her project too recognises an Irish processing need with the construction of natural Tannery at Derrygreenagh; Paul Maher’s mill for recycled steel deliberately creates an uncanny ruin in the depleted landscape while Shane Morgan’s water and air-cooled data centre takes full advantage of this isolated flat and wind swept site; James Browne’s scientific investigation into the construction of an algae farm and fuel stop on the motorway matches Kevin Coffey’s design research into a floating tomato farm and it is left to local resident, Aisling Flanagan, to draw upon an early nineteenth century plan to drain these bogs in order to grow and process flax for linen cloth production. Her proposal is a state of the art Linen Mill at Derryarkin. Through this wide range of architectural propositions and the inherent need to address the ethics and aesthetics of sustainability, we considered the recreation and reuse of the Irish peatland primarily at a strategic and holistic level. BOGlands offers us a unique opportunity to transform and re-invent a landscape. We looked at Derrygreenagh Bog very closely (just like Joseph Beuys) and through this intense examination we sought to design truly sustainable solutions, an architecture that explored and responded to the natural and cultural qualities of the landscape.

Essay Boglands

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Gabriel D’Arcy, Chief Executive Officer of Bord Na Móna, Pat Ring, Head of Property Development and Kathleen Halligan Head of People Development at Bord Na Móna for supporting the project and making this book possible. We hope we have contributed in someway to the strategic vision for Ireland’s peatlands. As always all due thanks goes to my fellow tutors, Dominic Stevens, Donal Hickey, Janek Ozmin, Laura Harty, Declan Scullion and especially this year Johanna Cleary. The School Executive remains ever supportive, we thank Orna Hanly and Cormac Allen. Also we appreciate that administrative skill is always applied by Aileen Mullane and booksales continue to be facilitated by Paul Moore. Our visiting critics too need a special mention, led again this year again by Tom de Paor and Simon Walker, Mike Haslam too deserves acknowledgement for continuing to steer the green agenda at DIT. Donnachada Gallagher, Brian Jordan and Paul Maher have done an excellent job as editors, designers and publishers of this book. Their input is greatly appreciated by both staff and students at the Dublin School of Architecture. BogLands continues our tradition at this school for engaging in ambitious academic collaborations, where there is a need to a imagine a new future. We, at DIT, wish to make a contribution to the Irish society and economy. We rely on architecture to remain visionary and for architects to be design leaders. The cutaway landscape of the raised Midland bog provided us with new ground, we hope we have shown how with ambition and skill, young architects can fulfill its destiny. Dermot Boyd

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Are Architects Screeching Hystericals?

How do our future needs affect the design of a building? Dominic Stevens

5th year Yearmaster

Aesthetics? Aesthetics is most often understood as being to do with beauty or appearance, even in critical architectural discourse the aesthetic is taken to refer to appearance. I studied architecture in the late Nineteen Eighties. It seemed to me at the time that what we were studying was an architecture that was primarily concerned with what it looked like, ascribing to Pevsners position: A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. …the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal. Pevsner: An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957) We were indeed interested in aesthetics, insofar as what our designs looked like was what seemed to be of paramount importance. Nobody was there to disturb this status quo, we were all architecture students, tutored by architects, the opinions of a client body, of society, the effect of our designs on the future, the messiness of the building process or the complexity of dense philosophical discourse were markedly absent. In fact, the area of aesthetics is much more complex and contested in the world of philosophy, involving, as it does a whole branch of philosophical thought. In the introduction to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics the editor defines it broadly as: Critical reflection on art, culture and nature. Kelly M. (Ed) : Encyclopedia of Aesthetics Oxford University Press, 1998. Wittgensteins’ famous yet enigmatic comment ‘ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’ (Tractatus 6.421) throws it open further…while architects and architecture students, in my experience, have only limited patience with complex philosophical

texts, exploring a term that we architects thought referred to appearance, yet in the hands of philosophers means much more seemed an interesting route into exploring architecture as having to be much more than just beautiful. Ethics? Over the years, our relationships with and attitudes towards food, health, energy, space, time, social relationships and (economic) value have spiralled out of control. Now, faced with the consequences of our over-consumption, we are desperately in search of ways to redress the balance. Is architecture able to play a part in restoring harmony? Can architecture help us to build a more sustainable society? From: Introduction to TESTIFY! Exhibition in the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut. Visited on our class trip. As discussed above, in architecture school students still seem to put most of their energy into “what does it look like?” The environmental movement gives us new criteria in which to invest– “How does it perform?” is the most obvious, yet – “How does it affect our future?” Is perhaps the more poignant and is the core question which to ask. The ability for humankind to house itself and conduct the everyday structures of its existence in a fashion that does not compromise our future would seem to be a progressive, pragmatic and ethical ambition. It is however an ambition largely ignored by critical architectural practice and looked upon as somehow retrograde and perhaps anti-modern. I suggest that it will be the essential component of all architectural practice in the years to come and that it is our responsibility at this time to engage in serious research into what this means to architectural culture. We were interested in this BogLands project to explore these themes of the environment and sustainability in an experimental and open-ended manner. It was a research project, a process of investigation, what was important was the individual questions asked by the students and how these questions, or concerns

Essay Boglands

impacted on the generation of architectural projects. Screeching hystericals? Everything breathes beauty and peace. Like an unnecessary screech: among the peasants houses, which were not made by them but by god, there is a villa. The work of a good architect, or a bad one? I don’t know. I only know that peace, rest, and beauty have fled… And therefore I ask: why is it that every architect, whether he is good or bad, harms the lakeside? Loos A. “Architektur,” in Trotzdem:1900-1930, (1933) quoted in Rykwert, R, On Adams House in Paradise (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972) So-called primitive peoples have none of the devil-may-care attitude when confronted with the reality of their environment…As a rule, it is tailored to human dimensions, without frills, without the hysterics of the designer. Rudofsky, B, The Prodigeus Builders (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977 ) These excerpts from two great twentieth century architectural thinkers seem to identify us architects as being screeching hysterics, while proposing that the vernacular structures that grew up in an evolutionary manner without architects are quiet, responsible and intelligent. I would love to think that architecture is a more serious business than one carried out by the gauche, screeching (though perhaps well dressed) person drawing attention to themselves at a party, and that architecture could stake a claim in the quiet, responsible and thoughtful corner of the room. Quiet, Responsible, Thoughtful This challenging project for final year architecture students to take on, it encounters territories unexplored to date in their education and runs counter the loud exhibitionism so often displayed (and

celebrated) in schools of architecture. I would like to mention three projects carried out this year that seemed to quietly address ideas about the future of architecture, about how are future needs affect the design of a building :- James O’Toole’s explorations of ad hoc re-uses of buildings led to an exploration of an architecture where a primary structure is architect-designed as a permanent thing of great beauty, while allowing the inhabitant to explore it as found object on their own terms, tailoring it to suit changing needs over generations, leading to a potentially very sustainable artefact for use over a long period to different ends. Grace Counihan undertook a project where the form was derived from a careful exploration of simple building methods. This engages the user in an ongoing dance of change and occupation as they add to, change or re-invent the building with the simple kit of parts invented by the architect, another example of permanence through potential for change and empowerment of the user in the process of architecture. Emma Forristals’ project also engaged carefully in this theme, exploring the dichotomy between the desired permanence of a beautiful architectural artefact and the potential rate of flux and change in contemporary society.

1. James O’Toole Nacelle Factory p40 2. Grace Counihan Innovation Centre p145 3. Emma Forristal (below) Beekeeping and Birdwatching Centre p86

As a tutor in a studio one hopes to be little more than a guide and an asker of questions. The whole studio, teachers and students together, collaborate on a joint research project, this year we posed questions about ethics and aesthetics at the beginning of the year and are left with many more questions as we reflect now on the work that was done. The three projects discussed above are circling around ideas about how architecture can cope with change, how it can adapt as its users see fit, or as their needs change, how the longevity of a building is not necessarily to do with robust detailing, rather it has to do with engaging the users in the process so that they learn to love and therefore care for their building, it has to do with giving them the tools and techniques for responding to constant change. In this way, the building becomes a dynamic, changing organism, fleet footed and adaptable, a second skin instead if a suit of armour.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Peatland Conservation and Sustainable Management of Bogs Kristen Klinefelter

Environmental Scientist

Sustainable management of bogs should ideally be a balance between economic well-being and ecological functioning. Though it is crucial to sustain the economic revenue that the country is accustomed to from the bogs, it is equally as important to focus on trying to restore this essentially non-renewable natural resource that is very important to the country. Most industrial cutaway peatlands essentially become black, wasted landscapes in need of use and purpose beyond what nature originally intended. However, we should not forget that there is still hope for repairing the somewhat less altered cotover and drained sites. In order to do this, it is imperative not to overlook the ecosystem itself, how it functions and what it provides to the world in its natural form, further emphasizing the role preservation and conservation play in the sustainable management of these unique habitats. In general, bogs are characterised by a high water table, a build-up of peat and low nutrient levels (Aerts et al. 1999). The acrotelm (upper peat layer) consists of poorly decomposed and highly porous organic matter that is saturated and has a high hydraulic conductivity, meaning that water can move much more freely. Because this layer is less dense and can allow air through its pores, it is also aerobic and referred to as “active” (as in it actively forms peat). Unique vascular plants can grow on this layer and Sphagnum (very important peat-forming moss genera) can form a mossy carpet for structural support. Below this is the catotelm where peat is much more compacted and highly decomposed with small pores and low hydraulic conductivity. The top layer is sometimes simply referred to as “litter” and the bottom layer as “peat”. This litter is stored in the upper layers because decomposition in the layers below decreases as peat formation increases. The properties of both of these combine to affect both water storage and water table depth in peatland soils as well as surface vegetation which relies on the very moist conditions bogs provide. Though water table variation and its effects can be seen seasonally causing shrinkage of soil volume in the summer and swelling

in the winter, major fluctuations are a somewhat recent event due to climate change affecting water table heights in wetlands worldwide. Because of this, Irish bogs are even more sensitive to the common threats they’re experiencing today. This results in an alteration of soil nutrients, mineralization and decomposition rates, and microbial activity. Another more direct way these can be altered is through drainage and peat harvesting, where the acrotelm is scraped off and the catotelm is exposed to experience oxidation and compression. Because of the recent water table instability in peatland ecosystems, it is important to gain a full understanding of what else is occurring in the soils as a result of hydrological instability as well as how the surface vegetation is being affected. Drainage, as a result of these threats is an especially important aspect to focus on as it can lower the water table, eliminating the bog’s ability for peat accumulation and no longer allowing to be considered “active”. It can also cause irreversible physical, chemical, and biological change including subsidence, oxidation, compaction, mineralization, and decreased water storage capacity all of which can contribute damage on an even larger scale in terms of affecting the global carbon budget. Irish peatlands are a major carbon store, holding more than 75% of the national soil organic carbon (SOC). Disturbances to peatlands, such as peat extraction or flooding, can therefore have major influences on carbon cycling and thus the world carbon budget. When the water table is lowered due to these disturbances, peat oxidation increases. Thus the peat no longer acts as a carbon sink but instead emits it as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide or even in some cases fossil methane normally fixed within the peat in a closed cycle, but released during disturbance. This fact can no longer be ignored, especially when combined with all other human-induced factors contributing to alterations in the carbon cycle and thus climate change as a whole. Due to increasing threats (including turf-cutting and drainage) to these habitats, Europe has experienced the greatest peatland losses (90%) out of the entire world’s peatlands. Because Ireland

Essay Boglands

contains 8% of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peatlands, restoration of damage caused by these threats is essential for preventing global damage caused by the losses of this major world carbon store. In Ireland, peatlands once covered 1,177,660 ha of landscape. Today, no peatland can actually be considered pristine due to such a high influence of primarily anthropogenic disturbances that have either directly influenced these ecosystems or that they have come to evolve with in recent times. Only 15% of their original coverage can actually be considered â&#x20AC;&#x153;near-intactâ&#x20AC;?, representing the most near-natural conditions before modern-day human influences. These are included in the 20% that are protected through designations as National Heritage Areas (NHAs) and Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) as a means to ensure current conditions remain as natural as possible and that habitats with the potential for restoration be brought towards these natural conditions. Current research on restoration of disturbed bogs has shown signs of success in terms of re-vegetation and raising of the water table, though these processes are slow-going and it is rare that any restored bog shows complete restoration success back to its natural form, at least in our lifetime. This should not discourage; it is much more so a matter of establishing long-term, better organized monitoring programs to record progress and assess what further restoration needs to be carried out to reach the goal of something that can be considered an ecologically productive habitat of good environmental status. Restoration and nature take time to interact and work towards something resembling a perfect union. Understanding this is the key to success of the environmental half of sustainable bog management.

Formation of Boglands

Boglands

Peatlands are a very important part of the history, culture and economy of Ireland. These vast areas of land are amongst our great natural assets. Bord na Móna

Raised Bog

Peatlands cover over 16% of the landmass of Ireland.

Blanket Bog

Bord na Móna own 7% of Ireland’s peatlands. After a European Mandate to cease peat production in 2030 there will be 80,000 hectares of post-production bog.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Formation of Boglands The Boglands or Peatlands have been formed over thousands of years and are composed of deep layers of waterlogged peat with a surface of living vegetation. In the majority of boglands, peat ranges from 2m to 12m in depth. Peat consists of the dead remains of plants in areas where the rate of plant production exceeds the rate of plant decomposition. These plant remains include: roots, stems, leaves, flowers and seeds. Complete plant decomposition is prevented in these areas because of the waterlogged conditions and the lack of oxygen necessary to breakdown the plant matter. Undrained peat consists of 95% water and 5% solid material. The Irish weather plays a crucial role in the formation of boglands because the high rainfall and low temperatures result in low evaporation leading to waterlogged soils.

(above) Cut peat showing bog stratification (right) Peat processing (far right) Rochefortbridge map by Shane Morgan

Photograph by Kristen Klinefelter Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Archaeology 20

Boglands

Ancient History Peatlands have been a very important source of archaeological material in Ireland. Artefacts found both under and within peatland deposits have provided detailed information about communities who lived in the early periods of our history as well as about the food, clothes and tools which were used from the Stone Age to recent times. Objects are preserved in peatlands because of the acidity of peat and the anaerobic environment (i.e. deficiency of oxygen) which exists within peatland deposits. Due to these very unusual properties, many objects have been preserved for hundreds or thousands of years. These would have decayed if they had been buried in mineral soils or had been left exposed to the aerobic environment. Bog finds have included weapons, personal ornaments, large lumps of butter and occasionally human remains.

(left) Sheep Skeleton (above) Tulland Man Photograph by Robert Clark, National Geographic

Bog bodies are rare survivors of human remains from earlier times and while many survive merely as skeletons, the preservative properties of bogs means that on exceptional occasions the bodies are in spectacular condition with hair, skin, hands, internal organs and other soft tissue preserved. The remains of up to one hundred men, women and children, dating to all periods, have been found in Irish bogs representing accidental deaths as well as formal interment and more casual disposal. Finds of Iron Age date are of a rather more sinister nature and what characterises them and sets them apart from other bog bodies is the fact that they represent ritual killings.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

(left) Old Croghan manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand. (below) Turf cutting.

Peatlands have been extremely important in preserving pre-bog Stone Age sites in a number of locations in Ireland. To date a total of c.1600 finds have been recorded from Irish peatlands. These finds include many toghers or trackways which were used to convey people safely across the perilous peatland regions. The trackways range from narrow pedestrian tracks to wide structures. They were built mainly from timber materials. Most artefacts recovered from peatlands are stray finds, but there are a small number directly associated with trackway sites.

Photograph by Kristen Klinefelter

Mapping the Boglands

Boglands

Mapping the Boglands During the Napoleonic Wars, the British desperately sought for alternative sources of raw materials. A supply of flax and hemp was crucial for making the sailcloth that powered their navy. It was proposed that this supply could be secured by draining the great bogs of Ireland and the land then used to grow flax and hemp. This in turn would not effect the established tillage land of the Irish farmers. Therefore a survey was undertaken between 1809 and 1814 and took the form of hand-drawn maps at a scale of roughly 1:20,000. Boglands of 500 acres and over were considered for the survey. An in-depth investigation of the particular conditions of the land was to be include: vertical sections showing slices of the bog and indicating the nature of the understrata, the extent and boundaries of the bogs, any features of existing drainage, an indication of the nature of the bog surface and of the condition of land adjoining the bog. The results of the survey produced 4 reports and over 50 printed maps. However, by 1814 the circumstances that had led to the establishment of the Bog Commissioners had changed as the threat of Napoleon towards the British had ceased. It had also become clear that the drainage and cultivation of the Bogs of Ireland would be a much slower and more expensive process than the British had first imagined. In a further addition to this, the conclusions of the Bog Commissioners stated that any large-scale bog development faced resistance because of uncertainties about land ownership, and because of widespread suspicions that any development would impact adversely on the traditional use for the peat fuel. This survey forms some of the first large scale maps made in Ireland and highlight the value and challenge of a countrywide survey that would be started by Ordnance Survey some 10 years later. They also give an insight into 19th Century Ireland with a

particular emphasis on the then unexploited Boglands. Recorded in the maps are outline town plans and place-names that are an alternative to the later OS Maps. The task undertaken by the Bog Commissioners shows foresight in the potential for development of the Boglands of Ireland. It would be over 100 years before an independent Government would establish Bord na Móna to investigate this potential again.

(left) The Bog Commissioners Map Of 1810 ‘Derrygreen’ (Derrygreenagh) The Bog Of Allen Rochfortbridge is marked as Beggar’s Bridge. Proposed drainage of land. (above left) 1884 Ordnance Survey Ireland (above right) 1910 Ordnance Survey Ireland

Photograph by Kristen Klinefelter Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Peat Industry in Ireland 26

Boglands

Recent History The use of turf for heating in Ireland goes back well over a thousand years. It wasn’t until the 17th century that turf became widely used, and by the 18th century it was the main fuel in Ireland. During the 19th century a number of methods were tried to improve the quality and consistency of turf. By the end of the 19th century however, peat was competing with English coal and because of its inconsistency, lack of density, and high water content, the use of turf became localized to areas close to the peatlands. In the early 1870’s a fuel crisis increased interest in finding ways to improve the qualities of peat for fuel. At this point an investigation into methods of turf production in other countries, such as the Netherlands was commissioned. In the early 20th century poor quality turf was imported via the grand canal into Dublin from surrounding counties. In 1917 the British Fuel Research Board appointed a committee to make recommendations on improving the harvesting, preparation and use of peat as a fuel. The Committee also recommended experiments in using electric machinery for the harvesting and saving of turf. As a result, 1919 the Dáil commissioned a report on peat as part of a comprehensive “Commission of Enquiry into the Resources and Industries of Ireland”. This report recommended experimenting with the use of peat for electricity and the acquisition by the State of all the large bogs in the country. The first Free State governments took no action regarding peat due to unrest and economic depression. However, in 1924 Sir John Purser Griffith decided to implement at his own expense the recommendations of his Committee’s 1921 Report, and purchased a bog at Turraun, Co. Offaly. He imported German peat excavators, and built a peatfired power station and an electrical network to power the German equipment. Because excavators mix peat from different depths of peat their use results in a more consistent product than hand-won turf, and this enabled Griffith to establish a distribution network in Dublin.

(above) Bord na Mona Workers Photograph: Heartlands.ie

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

In 1934 the Turf Development Board (TDB) was formed to develop and improve the Turf Industry. In 1936 the TDB took over Turraun from Griffith, and purchased large bogs at Clonsast near Portarlington, Co. Laois and Lyrecrumpane in Kerry. The latter bogs were drained and developed for use with German excavating machines otherwise known as ‘baggers’. During World War II Irelands indigenous fuel became a vital resource as coal imports for domestic use fell drastically.

(above) Footed Turf Photograph: Heartlands.ie

The Turf Development Board organised a major Government campaign to encourage private turf production. As a result of schemes such as these, few died of cold or had to eat un-cooked food during the war. The experience during the war re-enforced the Irish State’s commitment to developing the country’s bogs. The first development plan was put in place, the outcome was the transformation in 1946 of the TDB into Bord na Móna. The plan provided for two ESB turf-fired power stations, the development of 24 bogs to produce over a million tonnes of sodpeat per annum, the building of a moss peat litter factory and the establishment of a peat research station. Since then there have been numerous Development Acts that have supplemented the growth of Bord na Móna to become a leading industry in Ireland.

Boglands

Just as Ireland’s needs and priorities have changed over 75 years, so too have those of Bord na Móna. The core business has now expanded beyond the harvesting of peat. As local and global pressure has grown to find more sustainable ways of producing power and conserving resources, Bord na Móna developed many new services to meet those demands. As guardians of an extensive land holding, approximately 80,000 hectares located mainly in the Irish midlands, Bord na Mónas goal is to generate commercial, environmental and social value from this key asset. Bord na Móna is currently considering the most appropriate and sustainable use of the landholding and has established an in-house land use review system.

(above) Power Station Photograph taken by Donnchadha Gallagher

The development of peatlands in Ireland began as a crusade to clear barren wastelands and exploit them predominantly for agricultural land and fuel. It continued as a campaign predominantly aimed towards energy self-sufficiency and later towards maintaining indigenous energy. In more recent years, society has become conscious of the many values inherent in peatlands. This has resulted in the conservation of pristine and ecologically significant peatlands and attempts to restore and rehabilitate cutaway boglands. The peat industry has adapted to these changes and comply with designations and planning guidelines. The peat industry currently makes a useful contribution to the economies of the island and continues to serve as an important source of local employment.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Sixteen percent of the land area of Ireland is covered in both blanket and raised bog. Bord na Móna is the second largest landowner in the state, custodian and manager of 7% of these bogs, a total of 80,000 hectares. Turf cut from BogLands have been historically one of Ireland’s major fuel resources, though at present levels of peat extraction will be depleted by 2030. In this project we want to contribute as architects to research concerning how this cutaway or depleted bog can contribute to our future needs in terms of food, energy, culture and building. Matters concerning the environment are upmost in the minds of society. The architect will be practising within this context for many years to come and so it is important that architects engage in critically understanding the relationship between the architecture that is made and their understanding of the environmental movement. We propose that it is an essential ethical position that the buildings designed must attempt to make a positive contribution to our future needs as a global society, we suggest that this should never compromise their beauty.

A Site in The Midlands

The area chosen for this investigation is in boglands nearing depletion around the town of Rochfortbridge on the border between counties Westmeath and Offaly. The Derrygreenagh, Derryarkin and Ballybeg bogs form part of The Bog of Allen in The Midlands of Ireland. To the north of the site is the M6 motorway linking Dublin and Galway.

(left) BogLands under the control of Bord na Móna (Black- Derrygreenagh Bog) (below) Bogs of The Midlands. The route of the GalwayDublin M6 Motorway.

Galway

M6 Motorway

Derrygreenagh Bog in The Bog of Allen, near Rochfortbridge, Co. Westmeath.

Dublin

Boglands

(left) Bogland around the area of Rochfortbridge. (right) Infrastructure around these boglands; roads, drains etc.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

INDUSTRY

The depleted bog is a ruinous landscape. Machines have reaped and scarred its surface, transforming it from a natural landscape to an industrialised one. This creates an unusual condition in which the land is natural yet man-made. The processed peat, an organic substance, is shaped into an orthogonal pattern. The land becomes an infrastructure; it is divided by train lines and bordered by motorway, both of which connect the bog and its product to surrounding power stations, factories and the national infrastructure. The natural becomes confused with the man-made. However, the industrial landscape is of such a scale that it comes close to nature. It becomes a type of â&#x20AC;&#x153;second natureâ&#x20AC;?. The following projects aim to reintroduce industrial processes to a post-industrial landscape. They deal with this depleted land by way of transforming it into something productive.

Boglands

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Derryarkin Linen Mill Aisling Flanagan The Bogs Commission Maps are the earliest maps ever created in Ireland. Completed between 1809 and 1814, they were drafted by British Engineers under orders from the British Parliament to “conquer the last great wilderness” for the purpose of planting the wild bogs of Ireland with flax to provide vital sail cloth required to fight the imminent Napoleonic invasion. From studying the linen industry in Northern Ireland, which died out due to the high taxes demanded from Britain at the end of the 1800s, flax proved to be most viable and worthwhile of the few crops that grow on boglands. The mill element of the building designed for this site hovers over the groundwork and reflects the transience of the machine on the land. Its lightness and transparency creates a sharp contrast to the density of the water treatment pools and black earth that it stands over. It functions as a point of orientation in the vast landscape so that distant workers harvesting in the fields can discern distance and scale within the landscape. Bord na Móna and the boglands of Ireland have a long history of being worked by both hand and machine, in this mill both will be utilised. The human hand will create “die mauer”- the earthworks and the water tower monument that stands as a structural support to the light screens “die wand” enclosing the machine halls.

Linen Site Map Rochfortbridge to Derryarkin Bog

Industry Boglands

(above left) Linen Mill exploded axonometric (above right) Fabric Cast Studies These cast cubes were poured to test the compatibility of linen and concrete and if the quality of the weave could be expressed on the walls of the Mill. It was found that the linen acts as reinforcement and strengthens the surface layers against chipping.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

(above) Spinning Floor Showing folded precast roof and threedimensional column arrangement. (right) Linen Mill in landscape of bog cotton fields.

Industry Boglands

(below left) Linen Mill long section (right) Structural Model Frame in landscape

The Mill is located at the fastest flowing point of the Yellow River which is diverted down a 10m drop into the cutaway passing through a Francis Turbine at the base of the black structural tower, then pumped 55m skyward to a charred ceder clad water caisson whose weight anchors the tower to the bedrock of the cutaway. This allows for water to be pumped at high pressure to the machine floors for the creation of steam to maintain the 85 percent relative humidity demanded for the linen process. In the weaving hall, this necessity is greatest and is represented structurally by the hydrophilic ceder clad crowns which sit above the Jacquard looms catching and condensing steam at the apex and transferring it back through the structure to the humidifiers held within the Vierendeel truss in the floor plate.

Industry Boglands

Recycling Centre & Sedum Roof Factory Mary O’Brien The project aims to introduce a sense of rebirth into a postindustrial site in Croghan Industrial Estate, Co.Offaly. These aims are to ‘reuse’, ‘produce’ and ‘remember’. The site was originally occupied by an old peat briquette factory of which half remains, and the other half has been demolished. While looking at the site with a particular emphasis on examining context, one began to appreciate the sense of mass, grandeur, history, productivity and hardship evident in the landscape, buildings, skeleton frames and environment surrounding the industrial site. The framework consists of “reusing” the existing structures and services on the site, “producing” a worthwhile product from the landscape utilising materials from within the site’s context. This framework will result in this site being “remembered” for it’s calm presence as it functions happily within its newly adapted use.

(above right) Photographs of Existing Peat Briquette Factory Located south of the proposed bog, in Esker Bog, Co. Offaly. (right) Long Section

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Nacelle Factory James O’Toole After a visit to Bord na Móna’s Derrygreenagh Workshop, a fascination was instilled, partly because of the open-ended nature of the building but also because of the activities that take place there, in that they are highly skilled mechanics who make their own equipment. The factory, which was founded in the 1950s, has a history of importing ‘Fergusons’ from Russia and then manipulating them to suit the Irish terrain. It is in a very central location in terms of Bord na Móna owned bogs and has an extensive rail network that makes these bogs highly accessible. After meeting many of the staff who work their, I wondered what is going to happen to their jobs after the bogs have depleted. Bord na Móna are in the process of developing Wind Farms at Mount Lucas, Co. Offaly and Brucana, Co. Tipperary for which they are planning to import the Wind Turbines. As a result, Wind Turbines, particularly the machines that run them called a ‘nacelle’, were investigated. It works in a very similar manner to a car in that you have bearings, a gearbox, a generator, shafts and pins. Therefore an opportunity arose to keep the workshop as Bord na Móna’s central maintenance hub for Wind Turbines. The idea being that they will maintain the Wind Farms currently being constructed at Mount Lucas and Brucana, they will then learn from these as they did with the Russian Fergusons and then be able to construct their own. As a result, a new factory is designed which is to be open-ended in its nature. The roof is made up of a series of pyramids so as to be of a sufficient pitch to ensure dirt from the bogs runs off. It became apparent that the structure needed to be flexible enough to allow the factory to grow or reduce as they saw fit, given that the future of any industry is an uncertain one.

Industry Boglands

(left) Column Investigation (right) Interior View of Sunken Railway Line (far right) Factory Floor (bottom) Long Section

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Roof

(below) Nacelle Factory 1st Floor Plan 1:2000

Secondary Structure

Outer Bracing

-4m

Columns

Staff Entrance & Raft Foundations +4m

Ventilation & Drainage

+4m

Delivery entrance

Industry Boglands

(above) Elevation of Nacelle Factory.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Tannery Elaine Wynne

From the initial design, the building developed according to its needs with regard to light and ventilation. The storage area for the hides became a separate entity due to the smells and it is placed to receive the prevailing wind so that its wind tower may be constantly sucking out the smells. The building rests against the border of cutaway and virgin bog. People enter on the virgin bog level and look down upon the machine level from a clean environment above the roof scape. All the industry happens on the already machined cutaway bog. The main part of the building which had been a series of segregated rooms came together under one roof. The building became about a thick heavy concrete ground plane with the water tanks cut out and the walls reaching up and down to hold a light B timber lattice roof.

Image of approach to

uIldIng

(above) Natural Tanning Process in Fez, Morocco (below) Tannery in the South of France in the early 1990â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.

Photograph by Elaine Wynne

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Steel Mill Paul Maher Located along an existing train line in the Bord na Móna owned Derrygreenagh Bog, the steel mill adapts the precedent of heavy industry by way of reintroducing production to a depleted landscape. Based on modern methods of steel production, the project allows for the recycling and reuse of 100% scrap steel. This is achieved with the use of electric arc furnaces, which greatly reduce emissions and energy consumption in comparison to traditional blast furnaces. The project thus becomes a departure from the previously environmentally detrimental process. Instead it deals with the material consequences of the construction boom and the re-appropriation of the country’s hubristic remnants into something more valuable to contemporary society. Reflecting the nature of peat production, the project transforms amorphous scrap into defined object, the billet or ingot. (right) Perspective between furnace hall and casting hall. (below) Long section

Industry Boglands

The project comprises scrap yards, a main furnace hall, casting halls, machining hall and a central multi-duct chimney. A sectional hierarchy exists which is derived from the dynamics of the movement of molten steel, machines, people and gantries. The process halls, treated as protrusions in the landscape, act as signifiers of the importance of industry in society portraying an austere and monumental language. Materiality and detailing are reflections of the juxtaposition of permanent and ephemeral elements. A monolithic concrete base is contained by steel framed structures enclosing the machine halls. The datum of concrete is broken vertically at corners and at the base of column elements in order to impose a distinction and importance of structure. The steel mill reinstates the importance of industry in our society. A monumental aesthetic is a step towards a new portrayal of industrial modernity and man-made landscapes. The project aims to address the psychological effects of technological, social and environmental developments.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

+ 48.00

+/- 0.00

Perspective between Furnace Hall and Casting Hall.

- 3.00 +/- 0.00 - 3.00

- 6.50

View from scrap yard towards Furnace Hall.

Elevation/Section of multi-duct chimney.

Plans of multi-duct chimney.

Industry Boglands

(below) Cross section of furnace hall and casting hall. Steel framed halls meet concrete base element. (right top) Interior perspective of furnace hall. (right middle) Interior perspective of ingot casting hall. (right bottom) Interior perspective of subterranean train line.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Sawmill And Furniture Workshop

Jonathan Buckley

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The soil and site conditions in various parts of the bog have been proven to promote the growth of certain species of trees. Birch, oak, cedar, larch and alder have all found favourable growing environments in the bog.

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There are two methods of construction used in the making of the built form. One is an industrial method, which can be extended indefinitely, where the construction is the result of a layering up of timber members and bolting them together, while the other method is a refined, crafted system of construction expressing the artefact as the place of a furniture maker. The project is the result of these two methods and how the making of the built form can act as the generator of a design.

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A close proximity between the sawmill and felled trees ensures a better end product since the cut trees can be processed, debarked, sawn and stacked for drying in the minimum time. By designing the sawmill and workshop next to the forest there is a direct link between growing, cutting and making.

3.Ê

(left) Ground Floor Plan

GroundÊFloorÊPlanÊ1_100

Industry Boglands

(left) Interior View CNC milled model 1:100 (below right) Exterior Perspective

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Collective Distillery Niamh Chambers

This brief will provide a licenced space for artisan distillers to pursue their craft legally, and sustain its future for years to come. The surrounding bog lands will provide the raw ingredients for the spirit. The native fruits and flowers combined with the local peaty water, combine to from a wonderfully flavoured spirit which is unique to the area. The harvesting period is staggered across the year, due to the varying fruition times of the plants. An artificial lake has been excavated in order to drain the wetlands to the north. Water from this lake and the adjacent river will provide a supply of fresh water to the distillery. (right) Progression of cross section. (far right) Ground Floor Plan. (below) Photograph of Peatland PoitĂn Still

Photograph by Paul Maher

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Power Station Emmet Smith The Derryarkin bog complex is to be developed into a distinctive parkland with a focus on energy education and innovation, contrasting and complimenting the Lough Boora Park, which focuses on public amenity and biodiversity. In developing the existing rail infrastructure, connections with other Bord na MĂłna activities in the bog complex are established to enable public access. The power station would be relocated to an adjacent quarry site; the most heavily excavated area of the Derrygreenagh bog complex. The site is incapable of rehabilitating naturally, as all layers of soil and organic material have been removed, and therefore requires artificial intervention. The extent of the quarrying on this site has exposed the water table, creating a 500 x 600 metre man-made lake. The depth of this lake is approximately 8m, which, when combined with the 6-13m of bog above, has a total excavation of 14-21m. This lake, in conjunction with the prevailing winds, creates the opportunity for evaporative cooling to the northern fringe of the quarry. This proposal involves the cessation of quarrying on this site and the rehabilitation of the man made lake as a focal point for the restoration of biodiversity. At Lough Boora Park, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;biodiversity corridorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; have been developed and encouraged on the less disturbed fringes and along the rail infrastructure of the bog. These corridors both connect the bog and divide it, creating boundaries between rehabilitating bog, wind farm and biomass/ bio-fuel crop.

(left) Exterior View of Power Station

Industry Boglands

+73000 Exhaust flue

+61600 Heat recovery cooling condensor +59400 Turbine hall ceiling +56400 Turbine Hall winch level

+53200 Catwalk/ Sunshade floor03

+46000 Catwalk/ Sunshade floor02

+38800 Catwalk/ Sunshade floor01

+35150 Turbine hall operational floor

+31700 Turbine hall floor

+27400 Sub turbine floor service space +25200 Plinth & tubine connection level with Vibration impact control pads

+18000 Control room & operational rooms

+16600 Peaking Turbine & workshop winch level

+12600 Energy laboratory & workshop

+9000 Administraion offices

+7200 Mechanical workshop & water treatment

+3600 Canteen & lecture hall Peaking back up turbine

+0 Ground floor access loading dock, car park, boiler

-2000 water table

-7200 Storage level - Gas distilate, demineralised water, hot water, foul water -8000 Depth of Quarry excavation

(above) Longitudinal Detailed Section. Long section 1:500

AESTHETICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE FINAL DESIGN

Photograph by Donnchadha Gallagher Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Industry Boglands

Existing Industrial Process in the landscape. Photographs by Maria Larkin (left) Bord na M贸na narrow gauge railway line. (middle) Pump to drain areas of bogland. (right) Custom Bord na M贸na plough for making drains.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Spinning Mill And Textile Factory Maria Larkin Bord na Móna wished to find new ways of utilising the productive landscape of the bogs. An investigation was undertaken to explore the potential of the conditions of the bog to produce a natural product. Ireland’s sheep population is over 3 million. The wool from these sheep is usually dumped or under used in the textile industry due to the damp climate. The wool itself becomes contaminated and dirty and is classified as unusable. The textile industry imports most of it’s wool stock from Australia and New Zealand, as the climate there is warmer and drier and the wool starts out as a cleaner product. There is no large scale wool washing facility in Ireland, and no way to utilise the large amount of wasted wool. This facility would take the Irish sheep wool, and due to its location, process it using the acidic water of the bog which aids the removal of unwanted matter. The wool would then be spun into thread and produce textiles for use in high fashion industries. The product would be limited in production and there would be facilities for designers to come and specify there own textiles. Heather, tree bark and other plant matter found growing on and near the bog will be used in the dyeing process within the facility, giving the final product a unique character that is fundamentally tied to the area. 2.0026

(right) Ground Floor Plan (far right) First Floor Plan

Industry Boglands

(above) Organisational Diagram

(above) Interior View

(above) Longitudinal Section

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Plastic Recycling Facility Edwyn Hickey Resource Recovery is an innovation which focuses on maximising the re-use potential of managed waste materials. The goal is diversion of waste from landfills. Bord na Mona have a waste collection business, AES, and has 95,000 domestic customer’s in the midlands, South East and Mid-West of Ireland. They have a four bins system for different waste a household may have. This four-bin system can achieve a 60% recovery rate. As Bord na Mona do not have ‘Blue Bin’ plastic recycling facility in development, a plastic recycling facility is proposed to fill this need. Located in the Derrygreenagh Bog, adjacent to the Bord na Mona Headquarters, the project is sited on a disused gravel quarry. This disused industrial land becomes itself recycled to provide for industry.

(above) Experimenting in structural plastic. (far left) Quarry Site.

Photograph by Kristen Klinefelter

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Ruin and the Uncanny Paul Maher

Left: Etienne Louis Boulee, Temple of Death, c. 1970

The modern uncanny can be seen to emerge from the hubristic monuments that are the remnants of a post-industrial, and more recently, a post-economic boom culture. The illusion of past glory and the melancholic aesthetic of something that once was, emerges in the dereliction and decay of buildings. An emotional response is provoked by, as Luke Gibbons puts it, “the triumph of natural forces over human endeavour”.1 The ruin becomes a publicly jarring phenomena and is, as a result of its condition, an example of the modern uncanny. In contemporary Ireland, the ruins of the Celtic Tiger era are very much apparent. Just as the remnants of the medieval to the industrial eras lie as monuments to their point in history, the derelict concrete factories and ghost estates identify a recent past and are material signifiers of our success and mistakes. As nostalgic and melancholic settings, ruins create a sense of unease that was initially identified as the uncanny in the late eighteenth century. Since then, the uncanny has had many manifestations and re-emergences, architecture being often the medium for its projection. The uncanny is aesthetically an outgrowth of the Burkean sublime2, initially showing up in the stories of ETA Hoffmann and

Edgar Allan Poe, the common themes being the conflict between security and the homely and the invasion of an alien presence. The uncanny exists here on a psychological level, with the idea of doubling coming into play; a replica of the self being all the more terrifying because of its familiarity. The German word ‘unheimlich’ and our roughly translated English equivalent, the ‘uncanny’, are difficult to define. It is the very nature of the uncanny that it is ambiguous. This plays an inherent part in our understanding of the uncanny experience, something is terrifying precisely because it cannot be fully explained. As a result, attempting to exactly define the uncanny is difficult. Instead, one can describe the uncanny experience. In Freud’s essay on ’The Uncanny’3 he examines ETA Hoffmann’s short story ‘the Sandman’4, believing that the uncanny was truly first represented in the medium of Gothic fiction. In ‘The Sandman’, in particular, there is an overbearing uncertainty of whether the events the narrator relates to are real or imaginary. This was Freud’s version of Jentsch’s conclusions on the uncanny as, firstly fear of unfamiliar and secondly, intellectual uncertainty.

To Freud, it was derived from something that is not necessarily unknown or alien but on the contrary, from something that is strangely familiar. The uncanny is an anxiety created by fundamental insecurity; not quite being home in one’s own home. In this way, it had only been considered domestically and singularly. However, Walter Benjamin observed that the uncanny was also born out of the rise of cities and the manifestation of the metropolis, with its disturbing heterogeneous crowds and the creation of a new scale of aesthetically dominant spaces. The chaos of modern urban life and its alienation of the individual were reinforced by the reality of actual social estrangement to its inhabitants. In the nineteenth century, the remedies to such estrangement and uncertainty, such as reform, revolution and utopia, were caught in an anxiety of time. The dilemmas of transience were expressed in attempts to imagine unlikely futures and pasts. A fascination with times errors accompanied this, along with a fear of the effects of dystopian interference, and the effects of past and future shock.

Essay Boglands

The uncanny had been referenced to the home, as in a domestic situation and to the metropolis, at the scale of the city. However, after Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’5 he noted that the unhomely may refer to another situation. That of the no man’s land and of the ruins left after deeply scarring battles. After the world wars, the nature or the perception of the uncanny had been dramatically altered. Heidegger displayed nostalgia for the premodern, in the face of the nomadic and homeless depression. He felt that modern man was essentially rootless, “Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world”.6 In parallel to this, to the modernist avante-gardes, the uncanny provided material for ‘defamiliarization’, using the world that is removed from its own nature to deliberately make strange and shock. This interpretation of the uncanny became less about a nostalgic view of the world in the case of the expressionists, who explored the ideas of the double, the other, and the automaton. At the same time, futurists, surrealists, and metaphysical artists found the uncanny to be the elision between dream and awakening. This was exploited as a renewed aesthetic category, the state between reality and fiction being a vehicle to shock and astound. The sense of estrangement, and by consequence the uncanny, emanated from modern art as a response to a modern situation. A response that was closer to the world of the modernists, as opposed to the art of the past, which may feel close because of its historical rooting.7 The uncanny, once historicized, became understood as an aesthetic response to the shock and trauma of modern life. This is heightened by the repetition of terror that was the world wars, World War II being of an even more horrific scale, the terms of homelessness and alienation rang truer and truer. In the post war era, the uncanny re-emerged as an aesthetic style. This was reinforced by the exploitation of the uncanny by post-modernists. This understanding of the uncanny can be construed as a form of ‘paramnesia’,8 or state of flux comparable to déjà-vu. Baudrillard recognises this paradox by way of past and present becoming confused as an uncanny experience.9 The worlds of reality and fiction collide by way of inclination for the double. For Lacan, the uncanny was utilized to explore the territory of angst, the uncanny

sense that the object of our eye’s glance is somehow looking back on us. The renewal of the uncanny as a conceptual force has emerged in contemporary literature and painting, but mostly in film. The traces of its intellectual history have surfaced in the contemporary stylings of many filmmakers, influencing many genres. David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ and previously his series ‘Twin Peaks’ draws on the uncanny situations of the domestic commonplace. Lynch creates horror from the normal and familiar events of small towns. The metropolitan uncanny has been represented by the likes of Terry Gilliam with ‘Brazil’ (1985), in which the themes of Benjamin’s uncanny, as in the estrangement of the vast metropolis, are re-envisioned in a dystopian future. In fact, the science fiction genre is largely tied to the uncanny in its exploration of the cyborg, the future metropolis and the human inhabitation of space or distant worlds. ‘Brazil’ in particular captures a contemporary sense of isolation and the battle of man against the built environment and the machine, both representing political and social problems through physical manifestations. The uncanny as a concept has found a place in architecture. This is portrayed in the house (haunted or otherwise), at a domestic level where there is the intrusion of a familiar yet unfamiliar horror, and also in the city where a metropolis provides an estranging or alienating scale. Whether the architecture itself can provide this uncanny experience by way of spatial qualities, it is difficult to say. The alternative is that the architectural spaces themselves do not have possession over the uncanny; on the contrary it is an aesthetic. It is a mental state that is projected and that exists between the real and the unreal or between dream and awakening. Ruin The ruin has a strange sense of temporality, regardless of its apparent permanence. It is a sense that registers both the termination and survival of an entity. The ruin demands a narrative to be projected upon and manipulated. Walter Benjamin refers to this as the ‘irresistible decay’10, the fragments of a ruin withstanding time, yet falling prey to weathering and wearing.

The attraction of the ruin exists in its untimeliness, it has persisted beyond its end and is the remnant of a time that exists within another era. This is a cultural paradox that permeates the uncanny ruin; that it may portray both transience and permanence (durability), both the inevitable destruction of material things and the endurance of remnants that survive dissolution. An era that no longer occurs is revealed in the ruin, an era when it was functional according to its human design. The ruin represents this absent time in the form of decay and destruction with activity, human or otherwise, at an end. The house may no longer provide shelter and the factory may no longer produce, but in its incomplete state we become involved in interpretation and the creation of a fictional reality to fill the void of uncertainty. Christopher Woodward argues, as the ruin is fundamentally incomplete, ‘each spectator is forced to supply the missing pieces from his or her own imagination.’11 This narrative interpretation occurs as the ruin forces a confrontation due to material and temporal absences. Ruins, therefore, exist simultaneously as a physical entity yet also as something else. This existence is between reality (the present) and fiction (the past and possibly the future). The architectural life and afterlife of the ruin is construed. It is a projection of what is, what was, and what might be. The ruin embodies an abundant, chaotic and nostalgic anxiety of time, becoming a form of uncanny monument. The modern ruin, which has grown out of a post-modern and post-industrialised world, may also embody these ideas. However, it is all the more poignant as it has not come from a distant past or a forgotten era. It is not a borrowed nostalgia that we feel about these decaying monuments, as they still belong to the near present. Instead, these recent ruins provide a setting for a conflict of familiar and unfamiliar. The abandonment and decay of familiar objects disturbs all the more as it exists less in a fictional reality. The ‘unheimlich’ is emphasised by relativity of context and time. Ones morality is reminded by the wrecks of objects that were once recently in their prime. Now, in a state of

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

decay, the hubristic monument terrifies and alienates because of its recent glories and subsequent disillusion. The American industrial decline has brought with it a post-modern ruin, crumbling factories and disused machinery marks a postindustrialised landscape. The remnants of industrial giants such as Bethlehem Steel and the Detroit motor industry are lumbering, decaying monuments to past achievements. Fintan O’Toole, in his article ‘Ireland in Ruins’, describes the American industrial ruin as “today’s equivalent to the physical vestiges of Rome’s lost glories”12. The painters, who documented the ruins of the likes of Rome and Pompeii, have been replaced by photographers who memorialise the new remnants of a civilization gone past in the form of the American rust belt. Walter Benjamin presented the city as the setting of ruin in ‘The Arcades Project’13, in which he developed an allegory that sought to identify the ruin as an opposition to the phantasmagoria14 of the city. The ruin allows one to see history not as simply a chain of events, marked by timeline and the events of civilisation. It instead provides a narrative on death, decay and catastrophe. Body ‘My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body insofar as the house was already an indication of my body’ Jean Paul Satre, Being and Nothingness15 There is a long tradition of bodily reference in the architectural monument, from Vitruvius, Alberti, Leonardo, to the present. According to Vidler16, the idea of bodily projection in architecture may be categorised as, firstly the idea that the building is a body of some kind, secondly, that the building embodies states of the body and finally, that the environment as a whole is involved with bodily characteristics. Classically, the body was directly projected onto the building, representing an ideal perfection of human bodily form. Composition, proportion and hierarchy were derived from the body and applied to architecture. In response architecture would establish the body in the world. A second form of bodily

projection in architecture emerged in the eighteenth century in conjunction with the aesthetics of the sublime. Burke, Kant and the romantics defined buildings not by their fixed attributes but by their ability to evoke strong human or bodily emotions such as fear and terror. The interpretation of the city as a bodily organism in its modernist versions was still largely tied to the classical tradition. The direct projection of the actual body parts or the body as a whole was replaced by the notion of machines that generate a psychological response. Coop Himmelblau argued for an ‘architecture that bleeds, that exhausts, that whirls and even breaks’17. This living body is stretched and extended to include an entire city. The concept of a biological architecture, such as Himmelblau and similarly the science fiction projects of Archigram, intend to connect the body with design and context. The ruin is often the subject of bodily projection, embodying the organic concepts of decomposition and death. A reflection on mortality and a reminder that all things must come to an end, the ruination of a building is also, on a more physical level, a direct reference to bodily decay and aging. In architectural discourse, the human body is often referenced, for example, the structure is described as the skeleton or skeletal, the exterior cladding as skin, and the facade as face, to name but a few. It is natural, therefore, to compare the weathering and decline of a building (material decay) to that of bodily aging and death (human decay). The melancholia we feel towards ruins, especially modern ruins, may be due to the projection of one’s fear of death. The rusting of steel and the crumbling of concrete shows that even the most robust materials will fall victim to the forces of nature. Machine According to Walter Benjamin, the uncanny emerged at the new scale with the birth of the metropolis. The metropolitan uncanny was associated with phobias of spacial fear, caused by the overbearing scale and the vast heterogeneous crowds. The uncanny articulated the unliveable and unhomley modern condition. The alienation and chaos experienced by an individual

was considered a part of the contemporary sensibility. Man’s technological advancement had created this new scale of the contemporary city, yet the unnatural size and volume of the city’s monumental structures had grown to overshadow humanity. ‘Metropolis’18 by Fritz Lang provides an exaggerated, fictionalised vision of mans relationship with machine. The film plays off the themes discussed in the Futurist Manifesto, with the creation of a mechanical and monumental utopian society. This is best portrayed in the film when a turbine transforms into the jaws of a monster. The man-eating monster takes on the features of a fuming god, revealing Metropolis’ underlying ideology, which conveys mans struggle with modernity and the machine. The relationship that man has with machine is based on the uncanny sense that the machine can perform beyond man. Man is thus in awe of the man-made. Edmund Burke describes the sublime as a ‘delightful terror’19, this apparent contradiction refers to the marvellous forces of nature but is also applicable to the ‘technological sublime’. The ‘technological sublime’, as discussed by Leo Marx in ‘The Machine in the Garden’,20 looks at the juxtaposing elements of the machine and nature. During the industrial revolution and ever since, machines have proved monstrous, ubiquitous, and equally as powerful as forces of nature. As David Nye documents in ‘the American Technological Sublime’,21 the admiration of the natural sublime was replaced by the sublime of the man-made. The Grand Canyon as a subject of marvel was replaced by the awe of the skyscraper, the bridge and the machine. The technological sublime evokes shock and awe as the capacity of the power and force of technological systems are beyond the comprehension of a single human mind. The power of nature has been transferred to the power of man by virtue of human technology. Modern man has become less willing to be overpowered by the forces of nature and in response has used technological advancement to take some command of nature. It is this concept of the technological sublime that makes the industrial ruin all the more poignant. The industrial ruin portrays the triumph of man over nature and the subsequent triumph of natural forces over man’s endeavour. The industrial ruin recalls

Essay Boglands

a historical experience, be it industrial revolution, Fordism, economic boom or decline. According to Benjamin, “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”.22 Both ruins and allegories represent human uncertainty and the collapse of time. For Benjamin, “allegorical readings emerge with secularisation, a historical rupture that shattered the theological paradigm of salvation and its attendant certainties.”23 With the loss of these certainties comes the dissolution of order into decay, collapse and ultimately ruin. Although Benjamin was referring to Baroque tragic drama, in his theory his ideas have certain relevance to modernity. The allegories in baroque tragic drama of death and decay provide insight to the industrial ruins of the present. Ruins being a material signifier of industrial decline; as post-industrial symbols they mark the decline of economic and socio-political systems, such as Fordism or post-war industrial reconstruction. The desolation and emptiness of the post-industrial ruin is best captured by the compositions of the Bechers24. Although very few of their images depicting industrial buildings are actual ruins, their collections of eerie, monochrome photographs portray signs of desolation and abandonment. This may be a means to heighten the sense of an austere industrial setting which does not necessitate human occupation. The photographs represent industrial structures, through their formal aesthetics, as monuments of a lost past in the context of a post-industrial present. The photographs show no sign of life, and thus these industrial structures are treated as a form of architectural archaeology. “The Bechers remove these remnants of industrialisation from their historical context into an aesthetic realm of frozen time.”25 During the first machine age the distinction between nature and machine was clear, there was organic and inorganic. The house was then thought of as industrial, ‘the machine for living in’. However, now the lines are blurred between organic and inorganic. New technologies such as cybernetics and biotechnologies morph the idea of the body and invade beyond this into architecture. The cyborg culture, a product of capitalist technology and modern production, and its implications on

‘Metropolis’, Fritz Lang. View of the metropolis

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

architecture are possibly more radical than the likes of Reyner Banham would have imagined. However, the uncanny relationship between human and the machine or similarly the machine and nature has existed since the industrial revolution.

death, perhaps a living dead. Boulee had preceded the idea of the double as an indication of death, the building as a reference to the skeleton of the body. He acknowledged that beauty is all the more powerful when tied to the concepts of death and decay.

Darkness

This uncertainty of shadow and the depth of contrast between absolute light and shadow is best exemplified in the famous Paul Strand photograph ‘Wall Street’. The intertwined ideas of the uncanny and the sublime are portrayed by the depth of darkness in the opes of the J.P. Morgan building. An inherent imperceptibility lies within these unknown voids and their stark contrast to the bright morning light on the pavement. Humanity in the foreground is dwarfed by the sinister monument to commerce, the pedestrians overshadowed by the scale of the sublimity.

In the deepest and darkest recesses of space (occupied space) lie all objects of fear and phobia. Space as an indicator of the unknown and a sign of threat, operates as a physical metaphor for the deterioration of bodily and social well being26. ‘Dark space’ is considered an invading figure of ‘light space’. Vidler compares this “on the level of the body in the form of an epidemic and uncontrollable disease, and on the level of the city in the person of the homeless”27. In modernist architecture and urbanism there was a conventional assumption that dark spaces must be flooded with light, and more specifically to architecture that space must be completely opened to observation and occupation. This idea of hygienic space, pursued by the modernists, was based around a spatial design of complete control. The rational grids and opening up of urban spaces to light, air and circulation may be considered clinical and surgical. According to Foucault, this architectural paradigm was based on an initial fear in the face of “darkened spaces of the pall gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths”28. The event that saw the first considered politics of spaces based on the concept of light brought with it the creation of the spacial phenomenon of darkness. Etienne Louis Boulee was one of the first to apply the concepts of the Burkean sublime to the design of public buildings. Exploitation of absolute light in stark contrast to absolute darkness characterised his projects of halls of justice and metropolitan cathedrals. Boulee gives the Temple of Death as an example, a temple facade that is carved with shadow, an aesthetic of fear and uncertainty. “This genre of architecture formed by shadow is a discovery of the art that belongs to me.”29 He was proud of his paradigm of an architecture of death and darkness, and his contemporaries soon followed suit with their own visions of the abyss and mortality. This monument to death highlights an ambiguous moment, one that lies in the shadows between life and

Conclusion The uncanny has had many recurrences since it was first identified as an aesthetic category in the late eighteenth century, often manifesting itself within the realm of architecture. The nature of the uncanny as an uncertain and multivalent force provides eternal human intrigue into the subject. The uncanny is inherently terrifying simply as a result of its ambiguity; an intellectual uncertainty is created by the fear of something familiar being strangely unfamiliar. From its earliest representations in gothic fiction to its many interpretations throughout artistic movements since, the uncanny can be understood as an aesthetic response to the trauma of contemporary life. The architectural phenomenon of the uncanny experience emerges in the modern ruin. It can therefore be used as a vehicle to explore the uncanny in architecture. It is difficult to define whether the uncanny experience can be created by material and spatial qualities. An alternative being that it is an aesthetic projected upon an architectural space. In the case of the ruin, the uncanny is a mental state that exists as a result of a conflict between transience and permanence. The ruin has an untimely quality; it survives beyond its own era and it remains, albeit in decay, as a remnant of an era within another time. Lying between

past and present or reality and fiction, the ruin becomes a type of uncanny monument. The modern ruin, however, extends beyond architectural melancholia or simply borrowed nostalgia.

1. Luke Gibbons, ‘Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History’. Cork University Press, 1996 2. Anthony Vidler, ‘The Architectural Uncanny; Essays in the Modern Unhomely’ MIT Press, 1992 3. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’. Hogarth Press, London. 1919 4. ETA Hoffman, ‘The Sandman’. Tales of Hoffmann, Dover Publications. 1979 5. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. W. W. Norton & Company, 1990 6. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism.’ 1947 7. Theodor Adorno, ‘Aesthetic Theory’. Routledge and Kegn Paul, 1984. p262 8. Paramnesia- n. A distortion of memory in which fantasy and objective experience are confused. 9. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘The Ecstasy of Communication.’ In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983. p126 10. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Origin of the German Tragic Drama’. Verso, 2003. p178 11. Christopher Woodward, ‘In Ruins’. Vintage, 2002. p15 12. Fintan O’Toole, Ireland in Ruins: the height of folly, the depths of misery. Irish Times website (www.irishtimes.com) Sunday November 12, 2011 13. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Arcades Project’. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. 14. Phantasmagoria- a type of magic-lantern show in which rapidly moving images blend, change size, etc.; hence, any series of images that move and change rapidly, as a dream. 15. Jean Paul Satre, ‘Being and Nothingness.’ Washington Square Press, 1993 16. Anthony Vidler, ‘The Architectural Uncanny; Essays in the Modern Unhomely’ MIT Press, 1992. 17. Coop Himmelblau, ‘Hot Flat Project’. 1980 18. ‘Meropolis’, Fritz Lang. 1927 19. Edmund Burke, ‘Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’ . 20. Leo Marx, ‘The Machine in the Garden:Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America’. Oxford University Press,2000 21. David Nye, ‘American Technological Sublime’ 22. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Origin of the German Tragic Drama’. Verso, 2003. p177-78 23. Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell, Andreas Schone. Duke University Press. 2010. P271 24. Bernd and Hilla Becher 25. Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell, Andreas Schone. Duke University Press. 2010. P275 26. Anthony Vidler, ‘The Architectural Uncanny; Essays in the Modern Unhomely’ MIT Press, 1992 27. Ibid 28. Michel Foucault,’ The Eye of Power’. Pantheon Books, 1980. p 153,154 29. Etienne Louis Boulee, ‘Architecture. Essai sur l’art’. Hermann, Paris. 1968. p113

Photograph byBoglands Paul Maher

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

RECREATION

The Bog of Allen stretches across the Midlands, covering some 20,000 acres and crosses into four counties: Offaly, Roscommon, Westmeath and Galway. Much of the peat from this bog goes to feed the various power stations in the area. The bog supplies naturally, or through the remains of the interventions made by Bord na M贸na, the ingredients for certain activities to take place. This vast area allows an isolated space for such activities to take place which may not be possible elsewhere.

Boglands

Photograph by Courtney McDonnell

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

During the day, the sky was mirrored and absorbed by the damp bog, the landscape shifted and its atmosphere changed as the weather and light moved across it. After twilight, a million stars and a full the moon illuminated this bizarre terrain. I realized that I hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t felt the presence of the sky like this or even seen the stars in years. I was struck by the physical presence of the sky.

A Naked-Eye Observatory Anna Pierce

The observatory on the bog is a place for astronomers, students and the public to research and learn about the solar system and the planet. By having a greater understanding of the solar system and our place in it, we will become more respectful and conscious of the affect that our actions have on the planet. The observatory consists of six optical instruments that are placed on the bog. Each of these instruments has a particular function that highlights and tracks particular celestial events. Each of the objects are placed in accordance with their corresponding azimuths. Some relate directly to one another, some stand-alone. They are organized so that they are not all conceivable at once. They are discovered one by one and help to organize, orientate and unveil the bog. The bog is a huge expanding and shrinking terrain that shifts and moves like the sky. The objects are permanent jewels, while everything around them is transient. The naked eye observatory is about making the ordinary extraordinary. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about reconnecting people with time and space, an experience that makes them think twice about the world we live in and the role that we play. It turns the world on its head. Familiar things become new and exciting when they are experienced in a new way. By taking advantage of our dependence on sight, architecture can force us to look at the world through an alternative lense.

(right) 1. Polaris- Elevation. (below) 2. Soltice- Changes in perception of the object.

Recreation Boglands

3. Lunar Standstill

4. Celestial Vault- Daytime Section.

5. Equinox- Section

6. Polaris- Section and the Procession of The North Star.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Site Section

Recreation Boglands

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Peat Baths

Courtney McDonnell I sought to explore the entire bog to create a place to experience this unique landscape in the most intense way possible. After a detailed mapping survey of the bog across an area of two square kilometres, I focussed on a specific site with a landscape of great variety and interest. The site is essentially an overview of the entire bog distilled into a single place. To the north, the main road leading off the motorway provides access to the site. To the east lies the uncut bog, the west a mature woodland and to the south east, a newly planted woodland runs along side a drainage ditch. The scheme is situated at a crossing between a dense woodland and a virgin bog which rises three metres above the level of the forest. The baths are accessed through a cut in the bog from the changing block. The first space which the bathers reach is the main communal mud bath, situated in a constellation of other elements, including a shower, steam room and an internal room with individual mud baths. From here the route is optional, leading towards the other pools. As the distance increases, the pools become less tempered and more natural as well as varying in sound and atmosphere. By using the natural bog water for the pools, it means the spaces remain true to the place and while some are more tempered than others, they all in a way retain natural elements unique to the bog. Each pool has a certain life span and its construction reflects this. The mud bath is the most permanent, constructed of reinforced concrete with under floor heating. The circular pool on plan is constructed similar to that of a galleon ship. It sits in the ground and holds back the forces of the bog just like a ship remains contained from the ocean.

(above left) Oak Bath Plan (above right) Mud Bath Plan (below) Section

Photograph by by Kristen Photograph AlexKlinefelter Stupar

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Wetlands Park Simon Harrington

The masterplan deals with the bogs on a number of scales: parkland, land room and building. The proposed recreational wetland park complex is imagined as a central amenity location for communities in the midlands of Ireland to enjoy. Peatlands naturally exist in a saturated state but due to Bord Na Móna’s manipulation of the land, the bogs have been drained via pumping or man made drains. The proposal explores three different conditions associated with the hydrology of the site.

1. An existing quarry lake in the Drumman bog is manipulated to provide access for both course and fly fishing. 2. Existing pools of water are the result of quarrying and extracting peat from Derryarkin bog. A series of channels connects the pools, forming a new landscape for canoeing and kayaking. 2.

3. A pump which is currently being used to drain Ballybeg bog is turned off. The resultant flooding that occurs is controlled and the landscape is manipulated to form a contained body of water for competitive rowing. The lake will create a new habitat for both plant and animal life. Each land room is connected using existing railway lines. New platforms are constructed to provide gateways to each building and landscape. 3. 2000

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(right) Masterplan of Scheme Legend 1. Fishing Lakes 2. Canoe Channels 3. Rowing Lake

Recreation Boglands

Fishing Club A series of ramps, walkways and docks provide a variety of experiences when accessing the water of the existing lakes. The sandy ground which surrounds the lakes is contrasted by concrete platforms and timber walkways offering a new dimension to the tactility of the place. A building provides fishermen with a warm place to return to after a day on the water. A backdrop of cutaway bog and conifer plantation allows the building to define itself within the landscape. Fresh trout caught on the lake are cooked on site and can be enjoyed in the dining hall while admiring the view of the surrounding lakes. Rowing Lake The new rowing lake is formed between an existing train line and the topography of Croghan Hill. A series of constructed walkways creates a perimeter to the lake and defines the necessary space needed for competitive rowing. A starting tower, aligner’s hut, judging tower and viewing platforms form a collection of pavilions along the perimeter. A boathouse terminates the lake and forms an entry and exit point from the train line to the expansive landscape. Training facilities, accommodation and a bar create an ideal place for visiting teams and regattas. The boathouse is imagined as a grandstand to the lake, with Croghan Hill providing a backdrop to the water’s activity. The roof becomes a viewing area for spectators.

(top) Rowing Lake (middle) Fishing Lake (bottom) Canoeing Club

(above) Rowing Lake, Clubhouse and Stands.

Canoe Club The Derrarkin bog is cut to provide a series of channels which connect existing pools. A route is established for canoers and kayakers to explore the landscape from a specific perspective. Narrow channels offer intimate and slower conditions while existing ponds provide larger bodies of water. The canoe and kayak club sits alongside a channel forming a train platform, walkway and pier. Canoes are rented from the store house while the adjoining cafe opens up onto the water and allows people to enjoy a coffee and the reflections of the water’s surface.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

A Bird Observatory Hugh O’ Rourke

This project was conceived out of an interest in the Bog as a habitat for diverse species of birds and other wildlife, as well as an interest in the curious occupation of being a silent observer secreted in the landscape. The bird hide is essentially the embodiment of ‘architecture for viewing’ - an aperture to survey the landscape. Through an investigation into how this frame affects the perception of the landscape, the intention was to create an ideal viewing device which could translate into a full architectural scheme. The primary function of the observatory is to cater for bird and nature enthusiasts right across the spectrum from people with a casual interest in nature, to the amateur bird watcher to specialist ornithologists. In conjunction with the bird watching element, there is a conservation objective that is assumed by a breeding program and an education and public awareness strategy. The full scheme also incorporates a managed landscape, hides and aviaries.

(top) The Lodge and Bird Hide (bottom) Site Section

Recreation Boglands

Ballycon Bog Site Layout

Beekeeping and Birdwatching Centre Emma Forristal

Photograph by Courtney McDonnell

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Landscape Management and Visitor Centre Brian Jordan

The bog is a natural ancient ground. It is a collection of notions in relation to time, place, identity and memory. To stand at the edge of the bog is to stand at the edge of time; of days, of years, of centuries. Ritual and sacrifice have strong historic links with the bogs and there use as tribal boundaries. This engages the idea of the bog as a liminal space; a blocked path, where the ground itself shifts between solid and liquid and instils a tension between the past and present in the surface of these sites. The harvested bog is this uneasiness being unearthed. An interest arose in how the bog was cut, by machine but mainly by hand, and the culture, tradition and social aspects linked with spending the day in the bog. As a method exploring the ideas of cutting turf, an â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Open Air Museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in the form of a walk towards a harvested bog is proposed. Cutting the bog is seen as a method of extracting a way of building from it. The cut is made along the location of an existing drain. The cut intends to reveal the workings of the bog and through cutting the virgin unharvested bog shows the bogs history and encapsulates a method and tradition in turf cutting.

(left) Standing in a cut. (above) Entrance to the cuts made in virgin bogland. (right) View down a cut.

Recreation Boglands

The Visitor Centre is the base camp from which the visitor experiences the landscape. It will provide a piece of dry ground to put on their wellies, and when they return, a warm space for tea from a thermos and sandwiches from a lunchbox. There is a studio space from which the groundsmen work and a gallery for the display of objects from the bog where the story of the bogland will develop as series of snapshots in time. The building consists of a timber frame structure, holding objects which are the inhabitable rooms and has an emphasis on persistence and establishing itself in the landscape. The spaces that are within this frame are lightweight in construction with ceilings made from canvas, so that by day the shadows of the surrounding trees are cast upon it, and by night the underside of the roof structure is illuminated. Notionally, the components are like that of an inhabited section of a togher. The togher is an ancient road or causeway built to access boglands and was maintained by adding additional layers. The idea that these layers would sink to give foundation to the next layer begins to situate this construction as a snapshot in an extended timeframe.

(left) Site Plan, The Shape of a Walk (below) A notion of a sinking and layered construction.

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects First Floor Plan 1:500 1. Dining Hall 2. Kitchen 3. Restrooms 4. Studio 5. Gallery 6. Audio Visual North

2. 3.

Section A-A

Section A-A Scale 1:500

Recreation Boglands

Studio

Exterior

Undercroft

Dining Hall

Detailed Section

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Beekeeping and Birdwatching Centre Emma Forristal

Initially, the concept was for bird hides across the bog, hidden within the landscape. After further research, the majority of birds were found to be mainly in the bog in winter, with over 20% of Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s swan population coming to Irelandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bogs in the winter months. In the summer, it is the breeding season for the birds, and they are better left undisturbed. It was important to find an alternative use in the summer, bees seemed to fill this gap in use. Bees are active during the summer months and inactive during the winter, when the birdwatchers will be on the bog. The project proposed timber inserts within the concrete frame. Circulation is through the centre of the building with roof gardens at each level. Two service cores sit diagonally across from each other, with four lifts for beehives at the four corners of the building. The facade of the building was examined in detail. Beehives are located within the walls of the building, with space between for birds and bats to nest. Beekeepers have space within the wall to navigate around the beehive. The facade is a concrete frame with timber inserts and louvres, adapting to the different requirements of its users. The outer wall to the left of the image is open with just protection from louvres. Timber louvres protect the beehives from the driving wind and rain. The size of the beehive fluctuates depending on the size of the colony throughout the year, allowing for a changing space within the building and allowing for more views and light in the winter.

Recreation Boglands

(page left) Building in context. (below right, middle, left) 1st Floor Plan, 2nd Floor Plan, 3rd Floor Plan. (bottom) Section (right) Detailed section

COMMUNITY

The unique conditions of the Boglands has a huge effect on the way in which we inhabit the land. By default, any inhabitation in these conditions instantly forms a community with shared common values. This bond that arises from a shared intent, whether belief or resource related has a great bearing on the group cohesiveness, the social binding force which acts on members to stay in a group. The depleted bog offers the opportunity to aid the communities that live around them just like the many towns around the bogs which were developed and sustained by the interventions of Bord na M贸na. These towns can continue to sustain themselves through projects rooting themselves to the boglands. The following projects play with the idea of community in the bog, by introducing projects with a strong social agenda.

Photograph by Courtney McDonnell

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Palliative Care Centre Eoin Byrne

The Health Service Executive are currently pursuing a program of centralisation, where primary cancer care services are being moved to â&#x20AC;&#x153;centres of excellenceâ&#x20AC;?. These centres are located in the more densely populated urban areas, with the two centres for Westmeath and Offaly both located in Dublin. The Palliative Care Centre is envisaged as a facility to compliment the primary care that cancer patients receive in Dublin. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s location overlooking Derrygreenagh Bog is appropriate for a number of reasons. It is situated within a short drive of the M6 motorway, through which it connects within a half hour drive to the major population centres of the two counties. While initially proposed as a centre for cancer patients, palliative care is currently evolving to cater for a larger group of terminally ill patients, including those with cardiovascular and neurological diseases. It is intentionally not being referred to as a Hospice. This is to reflect the additional facilities that are provided for the care of patients who are not necessarily terminally ill, such as outpatient therapy, respite and bereavement counselling.

(above) Section (below) Bedroom configurations. (next page) First Floor Plan

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Greenhouse on a Quarry Luke Gleeson

Derryarkin Sand and Gravel is a gravel quarry 2km from the Rochfortbridge exit on the M6 Dublin-to-Galway motorway. It is situated on cutaway bog land. In quarrying the sand and gravel, the final meter of depleted peat was scraped off the site, and the extraction of sand and gravel began. Begun less than 10 years ago, the process has created a large lake, 6 meters deep, that stretches south across the bog. As the quarrying process is completed at 6 meters depth, the machinery and excavation will continue further south. In a harvested bog, this quarry represents the final stage of a depleted landscape. It is a piece of land stripped of all of its apparent material value. This site was chosen as the most interesting logical conclusion of the industrial harvesting of the bog landscape by Bord na M贸na. To the visitor, the place is dramatic. The large expanses of water, and shifting mounds of gravel, create a distinct and remarkable atmosphere. The brief chosen was to create a large food growing greenhouse. The aim was to invert the barren nature of the site by creating a high yield, massively productive parcel of land. The rest of the landscape is freed from its obligation to be productive to can return to a natural habitat to be used for recreation, or shared with other industries. The greenhouse, covering just over 1 hectare, has the capacity to provide fruit and vegetables for 4500 people a year, as well as significant amounts of honey, fish, and eggs. This prototypical greenhouse represents the first attempt in Ireland to create a new kind of agriculture. Sitting 12 km from Edenderry, a similar construction could be created outside towns like Tullamore, Naas, Newbridge and Kildare on similar bogland landscapes.

(above) Interior view

Community Boglands

(above) Aerial view

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

(above) Section (below) Interior views

Community Boglands

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

A New Town Centre Bernard Brennan

This project looks at the sustainable development of a town located in the bogland area of study. Edenderry has had industrial links to the landscape around it since the 19th century. It is also the site of Irelandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first peat-fuelled power station. As the town evolves to be a post-industrial community, it has experienced a surge in population and development but little or no investment in public facilities. The intervention attempts to draw energy from the housing developments, supermarkets and workplaces on the outskirts back to the centre through improving public space and providing facilities currently missing in the area. It contains a CrĂ¨che, Elderly day Centre, Performance Space, Sport Facilities, Covered Market Area and Ceremonial Rooms.

(left) Edenderry Town Plan (above) Layout of Intervention (right) View of Approach

200m

Community Boglands

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

0m 1m

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Community Boglands

(above l-r) Ceremonial Room, Covered Market Area, Sports Hall. (below) Section (left) Ground Floor Plan (far left) Axonometric drawing showing structural assembly.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Mental Health Respite Centre Clare Kilty

Proposed is a non-acute centre to facilitate residents of the Irish Midlands suffering from mental health difficulties such as anxiety, depression and stress disorders. Sited in Drumann bog to the North of the artificial lake, the centre maximises its rural location through the use of sensory gardens and a manipulated landscape as part of the retreat element of the scheme. It is intended that the centre will contribute to Bord na Móna’s vision to ‘generate social and environmental value.’ The programme is accommodated around three main courtyards ranging in degree from public to private. Smaller surrounding courtyards provide a different scale of space, externally and internally, allowing for social interaction at different scales, each with their own identity. I am interested in the natural and planned nature of civilisations/ communities and the visual and physical effect that has on a landscape whether permanent or not. This is an investigation into how the Architect today deals with precedence, distills from that a set of values and reasoning, those of a timeless nature, and applies them to design in a contemporary manner.

(right) Courtyard plan and elevations.

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0 5. Reception and administration 6. Staff accommodation 7. Relaxation room 8. Bathing 9. Changing 10. Library 11. Nurses station 12. Smoking area 13. Residents living room 14. Summer house 15. Sensory gardens

-1 16. Therapy and counselling 17. Meeting room 18. Residents accommodation 19. Residents garden

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(above) Plan (below) Sections (far right) Exterior views

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Exploring the possibilities of habitation within existing underused infrastructures. Bryan Ledger

On the 16/4/2012 Bord na M贸na handed over a large section of bogland to the people of Abbeyleix in County Laoise after years of planning. The bog will provide an area where the people of the town can go to enjoy the diverse nature in existence on the bog. This fits well into the original business plan of Bord na M贸na which intended to return the land back to the people in a better condition than it was in before peat extraction began. My thesis attempts to examine this concept of creating a new amenity for the town from a used Bord na M贸na site and trying to get as much out of the area as possible. The entire area will be given to the people of Rochfortbridge and it will begin adding value to their lives in various ways, providing energy, space for enjoyment as well as employment and attracting others to the area, boosting the local economy. The method by which this will be achieved begins with a careful examination of the existing infrastructure on the site. This will result in finding new ways the infrastructure and the land can be used. The addition of new points of architecture to the existing infrastructure will begin to transform the site and over time the area will become a productive landscape for the town of Rochfortbridge.

(right) Overall Masterplan

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Interior views of re-used Bord na M贸na Workshop.

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INFRASTRUCTURE

Peatlands have served as one of the main sources of fuel in Ireland for centuries, and as a result they have a strong infrastructural heritage. Bord na M贸na has one of the largest industrial railways in Europe. Permanent railways run from the peat bogs, stretching across hundreds of acres, to power stations, briquette factories and moss peat factories around Ireland. The following projects pick up on the potential to utilise the boglands as a place to house national infrastructure. Architecture is the philosophy that underlies any system. It defines the purpose, intent, and structure of a system. Infrastructure can be considered to be a physical manifestation of this philosophy.

Photograph by Donnchadha Gallagher

Site Map; road network site map; road network

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Bogland Cemetery and Wakehouses Donnchadha Gallagher

site map : 1:15000

The project deals with immanence and transcendence, their value and meaning in the conception of a contemporary architecture. The project focuses on the post industrial bogs owned by Bord na M贸na, in particular Bog Allen north of Nass. Under new EU legislation, Bord na M贸na have been asked to cease the cutting of the boglands for fuel, in an effort to preserve the remaining virgin bogs from being harvested for peat production. Bord na M贸na have been forced to look for alternative sources of revenue. As it stands vast tracts of harvested bogland lie desolate across the country. This project investigates how an urban based problem can be solved through engagement with these post industrial boglands. The lack of space available in urban centers to provide for the amenities of cemeteries, coupled with the existing unregulated industry which caters for the deceased have resulted in burial plots becoming the most expensive plots of land per sqm in the country. By allocating one of these harvested bogs to become a replacement for urban cemeteries, an economic, environmental and cultural problem can be solved.

Site Plan 1:15000

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site map; field pattern

Infrastructure Boglands

(left top) Model highlighting bog Allen. (left bottom) Plan and section of mounds. (below) Perspective of burial mounds.

Bogland Cemetery and Wakehouses This is the summation of all the components explored in this thesis. The project deals with immanence and transcendence, there value and meaning in the conception of a contemporary architecture. The brief is a response to an economic, environmental and cultural stainability issue. It focuses on the post industrial bogs owned by bord na mona, in particular bog Allen north of Nass. Under new EU legislation Bord na mona have been asked to cease the cutting of the boglands for fuel, in an effort to preserve the remaining virgin bogs from being harvested for peat production. Bord na mona have been forced to look for alternative sources of revenue.

As it stands vast tracts of harvested bogland lie desolate across the country. This project investigates how an urban based problem can be solved through engagement with these post industrial boglands. The lack of space available in urban centers to provide for the amenities of cemeteries, coupled with the existing unregulated industry which caters for the deceased have resulted in burial plots becoming the most expensive areas of land per sqm in the country. Traditional burials ignore the zeitgeist and have become an untrue representation of contemporary society. By allocating one of these harvested bogs to become a replacement for urban cemeteries the vicinity. An economic, environmental and cultural problem can be solved, as well as creating an industry which orientates itself around an ethical position.

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Over the past fifty years, Ireland has undergone a shift from a primarily rural population to a more centralized urban population. This increase from rural to urban has had numerous implications on the cultural and traditional aspects of Irish life. Specifically the tradition of the Irish wake, and the inability to carry this tradition out in built up urban environments. The project opens up the potential to revive the culture of the wake as apart of the burial and grieving process. The cemetery itself is a radial scheme that develops over time with three centralized chapels. The burial mounds pick up on the existing grain of the site and determine the initial layout of the cemetery grounds.

(above) Section through building (above right) Aerial perspective of site (right) Procession from wakehouse to chapel.

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(above) Axonometric drawing of the scheme.

(above) Internal perspectives.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Aeroponic Tomato Farm Kevin Coffey

This project investigated the implementation of an aeroponic tomato farm in the Ballybeg Bog, Rochfortbridge Through architectural investigations into optimisation, the scheme has provided new, exciting proposals that follow a sustainable principle. The use of optimisation helps to clarify and justify ideas which could otherwise seem wilful. This approach suits the scale of the bog, where boundaries are not as strictly defined and site strategy can become arbitrary. The final outcome is an architecture that responds to the site, accommodates the individual, satisfies the strict requirements, while still revealing a personal expression. Currently, Ireland imports almost 30,000 tonnes of tomatoes annually, to a value of almost €40 million. Tomatoes have been grown in Ireland for a long time. In 1946, a discussion regarding the banning of importation of tomatoes took place in Dáil Éireann, in order to support the cost of Irish grown tomatoes. In terms of sustainability, the desire for cheap tomatoes has led to an unfortunate reduction on in the quality of produce that is imported. In general, the tomato varieties chosen have a good appearance, do not bruise easily and respond well to refrigeration. These qualities often come at the expense of taste. This project investigates the role of aeroponics - a highly intensive growing medium - in growing tomatoes for Ireland.

(right) Floating greenhouses Showing a single rotating disc - an optimum ratio of greenhouse area to circumference. The greenhouses touch the land at a single location -represented by the inhabited strip to the East of the project, sitting on the high point between the flooded plains. (far right) Interior perspective of greenhouses.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Algae Farm and Fuel Station James Brown

The architectural proposal is for the re-use of the cutaway boglands at Rochfordbridge as an algae farm - a production facility for fuel, a system which could be implemented across the boglands of Ireland as they cease to provide viable means of creating energy. Bord Na Móna controls 7.5 % (77,000 hectares) of the boglands of Ireland, many of which have been cutaway beyond productive yield. The vast expanse of these has proven unsuitable for growing conventional crops, such as various species of trees for biomass, which require nutrient rich soil. These problems do not affect the algae, which photosynthesize, rather than rely on the ground for a source of food. The location of the scheme borders the M6 Galway - Dublin Motorway. Here, the oil bearing algae is grown in ponds, processed, refined, stored and sold as fuel to users of the Motorway. The scheme accommodates Bord Na Móna’s three pillars of energy policy: security of energy supply, sustainability and environmental protection and cost competitiveness. The ambition for the project is to reduce dependence on imported fuel oil, and to immerse users in the productive background of the fuel they use.

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(left)

Plan of algae farm. (top)

Interior of fuel station.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Reservoir and Research Laboratory Ronan Murray

A structures’ task is to support, retain, enclose and provide. However, a structure can speak of the society that built it. It’s existence shows the development of thought that existed up until construction. The technological, material and structural science that forms the background of a structure, places it in the continuum of building history. An ambitious project is seen to be an investment into a new existence. Pushing boundaries and concreting ambitious thinking can become the mark of a society in history. Here, the reservoir structures a decimated bog landscape, resolving its existence into a support system for Dublin. Water is abstracted biannually from the Shannon River according to its flood cycle. An intake tower stands as the focal point within the scheme. It’s north - south orientation removing it from local contextual alignments and placing it in an universal setting. An understanding of this disjoint is developed through approach and encounter along the reservoir wall. Permanent water filtration and temporary water research functions are supported in, and by, the intake tower. Water is filtered through the walls of the intake tower and is refined in the reed beds to the south before being carried along the Grand Canal to Dublin. (left) Production of peat. (right) Plan and section of research lab.

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Laboratory +1. 1:250 1. Office 2. Toilet 3. Access.

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(top) Interior of Research lab and view from reservoir wall. (right) Perspective of reservoir and research lab.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Data Centre and Computational Research Facility Shane Morgan

The intention of this thesis is to investigate and assess the overlap among pieces of critical infrastructure, while exploring the nature of both physical and digital infrastructures, and perhaps most importantly, the physicality of digital infrastructures. The thesis project hosts a data centre, and a computation research laboratory. Datacentres are the physical warehouses of the digital world. They consume vast quantities of power and demand high levels of infrastructure and redundancy systems. The area of Portlaoise is well serviced insfrastructurally. The M7 offers direct motorway access, but also a series of fibre ducts that help connect the internet infrastructure. On a global scale, it is a node which plugs into a vast matrix of seemingly limitless connections. On a local scale, it is a monumental facility, dominating the sparse skyline of the boggy midlands. To boost the country’s output for quality technological research, a fully capable facility is a necessary starting point. Ireland currently ranks 117th in the world for computational power. The aim of the project is to interrogate the nature of the co-location environment: the co-location data facility and the co-location work space, and the intersection between them. The mat nature of the repetitive rows of servers runs contrary to the typical requirements and needs of space for human habitation. Overlaying circulation paths in a three-dimensional pattern allows for maximising potential overlap between the users. A dominant sub-theme of the thesis work has been the focus on redundancy systems and collaborative work modes. The physical proximity of research collaborators has a distinctly positive effect on the quality of their work. A chance encounter can spark a fantastic idea. ”If you want people to work together effectively, [you] need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions” Issac Kohane

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Aerial view of building and context.

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(above) Data center cooling system (right) Axonometric of Data Center Showing detailed interior in highlighted area.

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Perspective of building and context.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

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Proposed wetlands, controlled perimeter

Primary fine sediment filter and UV treatment area

Pre-filter lock and flow gate, two day mechanical rotation

Horizontal slow sand filters, fine sediment removal

Horizontal gravel filters, reinvigoration of o2 and n 2

Three day holding tank

Overflow valve to Yellow river

Secondary UV treatment plane, 200m capacity @ 20mm

Tea house and public rest area

Utility and servicing house

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Final water treatment laboratory

Pressure tank

Services access, water mains connection and pump house

Public parking and access to wetlands

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When Bord na Mona finish cutting away the bogland and switch off their drainage pumps, the land returns to its original state, a wetland. The water table rises and the lakes drain to the surrounding river courses in an unregulated and free flowing manner. The water treatment facility occupies that border between wetland and adjacent river courses. The facility is a gravity fed system that removes sediment and colouring and returns the water to a purified state before treating it to potable drinking water standards.

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This â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;regulating tapâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in the landscape treats the water as it runs on its natural path. When the system requires cleaning, the lakes will overrun the facility on a controlled path. The facility acts in tandem with the natural context within which it sits. The proposed facility defines the perimeter of the wetlands by sitting at a particular height and only processes the overflow water.

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(above) Perspectives of pavilions. (left) Filtration system (far left) Axonometric of tower pavilion.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Derryarkin Forestry Centre: National Debt Forgiveness Programme David Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Brien

This project wishes to continue the story of the Boglands as a natural energy reserve, through the harvesting of birch trees for use as a biofuel in the existing Edenderry Power Station. Birch trees would be grown for their high calorific content and because the Downy Birch grows well in bogs. This project seeks to critique the development of a willful community in an isolated context. Historically, the bog has combined myth with machine; it is part romantic Ireland of druids and ceremony and part invaluable natural resource. This project seeks to continue the story of the bog in such a manner, creating a narrative through which our recent national relationship with land value, wealth and debt can be critiqued, and through which the bog can continue to be a productive national resource. This backdrop is a device through which the creation of a voluntary community can be studied and the conflict of the individual and the collective in communal spaces can be explored. The architectural investigation into the creation of communal spaces, the manner in which they function and the design for balance between individual behavior and collective needs, is given the freedom to be grounded in Derryarkin Bog as a result of the provocative device that is a Programme for National Debt Acceleration.

(right) Model of timber frame. (far right) Construction process of frame.

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Infrastructure Boglands

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

A Juveile Detention Centre Niamh Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Flaherty

Currently, the only juvenile facility in Ireland is located in the building of the former womens prison beside Mountjoy prison. There is no connection to the world outside and only very rigidly controlled interactions within the complex. The only time alone allowed is within the cells where space is extremely limited. Every act is controlled, independence and individuality are not facilitated. This impedes rehabilitation. On release these juveniles are expected to integrate into society, to be responsible for themselves, to avoid recidivation but there exists no place for them to learn this in the currently detention centre. 80% of juveniles detained re-offend. Independence is manifested by allowing the juveniles a place to exist both as a collective, in social spaces, and as individuals, private spaces for which they are personally responsible. The form and the function of the building are interdependent. It needs to be a secure space that also accommodates the various uses of the building. Within the overall themes of ethics, aesthetics and sustainability the project aims to provide a place for juveniles that is secure while allowing them to inhabit a building in which they are treated as humans and provided with the best opportunity to re-enter society without committing further crimes. The building itself evolved into a mat building with many courtyards allowing for natural ventilation and constant access to the external.

(top right) Evolution of building plan. (right) Building in landscape.

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Photograph by Shane Morgan

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Boundary and Freedom in Architecture: Between the Ideal and the Real. Olivia Hillery

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1. Introduction (i) What is Boundary? A boundary is the limit of anything. A boundary can be material or immaterial.1 A boundary is both the action of enclosure and the enclosure itself. Thus, boundary is both the action of an ideology, the ideal, and the physical manifestation of that ideology, the real. The ideal is created by the social, political and cultural forces acting on a society. The real is the architectural interpretation of the ideal. The boundary, and its meaning, is the beginning and end of architecture. In Ancient Greece, the boundary and the body politic were codependent. The Greeks divided the world into the Public and the Private Realm. The Private Realm was concerned with necessity. Only when the necessities of the private world had been satisfied could the Greek citizen engage in the public world. The Public Realm was concerned with the question of beauty, either the consumption of beauty, the doing of beautiful deeds (in the polis) or the contemplation of lasting beauty (the philosopher). The boundary was necessary for the Greeks in order to define where one world ended and another began. Each house was a political enclosure. The boundary that seperated the public and the private was not a wall but a space. This space was a kind-of no man’s land between the public and the private, sheltering and protecting both while at the same time, seperating them from each other.2 In the Greek world, without a wall there could be no law. The metaphorical boundaries of our world today are not as clear as they were in Ancient Greece. There is a third realm, “the social realm”, which blurs the line between the public and the private world. The word “social” does not exist in Greek language or thought. The Greeks did not consider the “social” to be a specifically human characteristic, it was something human life had in common with animal life. The word “social” is Roman in origin and its Latin meaning is; “an alliance between people for a specific purpose or to commit a crime”. With the rise of the nation-state in the ninteenth century the boundary between the public and the private world was blurred even further. The new nation-state combined activities relating to the common world, the Public Realm, and those relating to the maintenance of life, the Private

Realm. The nation-state is a body of people in the image of a family whose everyday affairs must be taken care of by a gigantic nationwide administration of housekeeping. The architecture of the new ideologies of freedom and the nation-state required a new form to articulate a more complex society. In the search for a new style, eighteenth century architects turned to the classical world of Greece and Rome. Neo-classical architecture developed along two distinct paths. The first was a belief in structure as the ultimate expression of the new state. The Vitruvian attributes of architecture; utility, solidity and beauty, now became; utility, solidity and fitness or appropriateness to purpose. Structural rationalism is best expressed in Laugier’s “primitive hut” which is a ‘natural’ architecture composed only of structure where the space between coloumns was to be as fully glazed as possible. The second path of eighteenth century architecture was a desire to express the romantic aspects of Classical architecture. Architect’s like Ledoux and Gily made an eclectic use of antique motifs to give Neo-Classical architecture an instant heritage, such as in Ledoux’s ideal city of Chaux, in which elements were rendered according to character.

(ii) Objectives The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the idea of freedom and the construction of boundary in architecture. This dissertation poses two question: How is freedom represented in architecture? And, consequently, how can architecture be used to mediate between the ideal and the real? (iii) Overview of Dissertation The dissertation will investigate the connection between an ideology and its built form. It will explore the ambiguous boundary in Modern architecture and its psychological impact. How do we represent boundary and freedom? The work of an architect will be explored through this theme and a particular building studied in depth. Case studies will be used throughout to illustrate the points made. A collection of conclusions will be presented at the end which summarise the results of the research undertaken.

This search for a new style was accompanied by the search for a new form. Ledoux’s ideal city of Chaux, represents the architectural form of the new social order created by the industrial revolution. Integrating worker’s housing, productive units and the manager’s house. Collective housing for a new non-repressive society in this “new industrial world” could be located in ideal communities in buildings reminiscent of palaces such as in Fourier’s Phalansteres, modeled on the palace at Versailles. With the rise of capitalism, increased technical possibilities and new ways of living the ideal architecture of the nineteenth century was to prove highly influential to architects of the Modern Movement. Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse sought to eliminate all boundary in a new world built for modern needs; “....a city in which all authority was to be dissolved; all convention superseded; in which change was to be continuous and order, simultaneously complete; in which the public realm, without further reason to excuse itself, was to emerge undisguised by the protection of facade”3

1. Oxford English Dictionary [online] Available at: http://0-www.oed.com.ditlib.dit. ie/view/Entry/22048?redirectedFrom=boundary#eid [Accessed on: 20th October 2011] 2. Arrendt, H (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 3. Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London. (Introduction, p. 4)

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2. The Ideology of Freedom (i) Utopia The first use of the word “utopia” in English comes from Sir Thomas More’s depiction in 1516 of an imaginary island which enjoys a perfect social, legal and political system. The word in its original Greek context means a “non-place”, however, in English it is now taken to mean a “good place”4. The classical utopia of Plato’s Republic is one of the mind. It exists as an object of contemplation and behaves as a detached reference. It’s architectural form; “the ideal city” is a hypothetical image, to be observed and enjoyed for its own sake or used as a reference. It was not prescriptive. However, as the ideological landscape changed, post-Enlightenment, the contemplative utopia became an achievable objective. This occured due to the fall of the ancient regimes and the rise of a new concept of society in a move towards democracy. Also, as the “measurable could increasingly be equated with the real”5, an idea based on Newton and rationalism, the ideal concept of “Utopia” could now become real. This fuelled an “activist utopia”, the active pursuit of a utopian society, that formed the basis of the Modern movement. (ii) The Sublime and the Monument Boundary and freedom have often found expression in the architectural monument and its ability to approach a sublime aesthetic experience. The difference between the beautiful and the sublime is the difference between the mundane and the extraordinary. The sublime is often associated with nature and Burke6 describes it as “productive of the strongest emotion of which the mind is capable of.” Could it be possible to reach the sublime in a built form? Two infamous examples of the sublime in architecture are Piranesi’s drawings of Roman ruins and Boullee’s project for a cenotaph for Issac Newton, both of which have the power to evoke emotions of terror and tranquility. However, the difficulty of achieving the sublime through architecture becomes clear from these examples, it is often unbuildable. The sublime is a response to something we cannot understand or control. Our reaction to the sublime is illogical, having abandoned all effort to control our surroundings we are either overcome by feelings of terror at our fragility or feelings of joy at our freedom. The sublime demonstrates that feelings of pain and danger are in close Fig. 1: Sir. Thomas More: frontispiece from Utopia, 1516.

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proximity to feelings of joy and tranquility and they all revolve around something we cannot control, such as nature or freedom. The sublime is a reaction to something which cannot be measured and it is, therefore, difficult to create a physical object to inspire the sublime. And so we might say that the sublime is an ideal, like a utopia, a metaphorical reference that is useful in the creation of the real but is itself never realizable. It is, in Kahn’s words, the difference between Feeling and Thought, where feelings are the unmeasurable dreams of what we desire to create and thought is the expression of feeling by measurable means. That in attempting to make an architecture from our dreams we must concede that; “The first line on paper is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully. The first line on paper is less”7. However, the power of the sublime to inspire can never be underestimated; a reproduction of Piranesi’s etching of the Campus Martius in Rome hung on the wall above Kahn’s desk8 and doubtless inspired Kahn in the building of an architecture which aspired toward the monumental and the sublime.

4. Oxford English Dictionary [online] Available at:http://0-www.oed.com.ditlib.dit. ie/view/Entry/220784?redirectedFom=utopia#eid [Accessed on: 20th October 2011] 5. Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London, 1983, Utopia: Decline and Fall? p. 15. First published;1978. 6. Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke, E., London, 1756 7. Louis I. Kahn, “Form and Design,” in Vincent Scully, Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1962), p. 114-21. 8. Scully, ibid., p. 37

Fig. 2: Schematic Plan of a Usonian House A : typical room with walls joined at four corners; B: Wright eliminates the corners – walls become slabs; C: Wright reassembles segments of these slabs Fig. 3: Mount Vernon, Fairfax County, Va. Fig. 4: Maison Dom-ino, Le Corbusier, 1915

3. Ambiguous Boundaries (i) Dissolving the Wall: Frank Llyod Wright As technology improved at the beginning of the twentieth century, new configurations of space became possible to respond to new social orders, particularly in the home. In the work of Frank Llyod Wright, we can see the desire to “break the box” of Victorian living. Wright manipulated the corners between rooms to create a new type of flowing space, an increased openess in the home in the overlap between one room and another. In the Ross house (Appendix 1) of 1902, the shifting of the corner between the dining and the living room created a greater visual connection between the two rooms, both rooms could now make use of an area within the other room’s space9. By freeing the wall from its corners, it became a slab, and in becoming a slab its position was not fixed in space and could be reassembled to define something new (Fig. 2). However, as Wright dissolved the wall he needed other ways of defining space within the building and he turned to the horizontal slabs of ceiling and floor to define the use-area in a region where the walls had been removed. In the composition of Wright’s earlier houses, there is a single mass to the front, the external spatial order, while at the back the building breaks up into multiple forms sliding up and past each other, the internal spatial order. In his later Prairie Houses, the external order of the building was no longer of any consequence to Wright as he came to the idea that; “a building should be formed from the inside outwards, just as a person of integrity and conviction derives strength and actions from within rather than from external social mores”10. As he continued to reduce the wall to its absolute structural essentials, Wright could allow space to flow in accordance with his ideology for the freedom of horizontal movement. He could also now explore a new external order to express interior space on the outside. Wright developed a number of symbolic openings that could be read externally to express the interior space, “a higher roof and banks of glazed French doors signalled a more private living space; modest windows facing a protected court were those of a bedroom”. In this way, Wright came to a synthesis of interior and exterior order in the facade, which for him was the expression of the interior, the most important element of the home.

Essay Boglands

(ii) The Facade The facade is the face of the building. It mediates between inside and outside. The facade is the point of compromise between the complexities of the interior program and the public face of the building. Buildings have both an internal and an external spatial order. An internal spatial order gives an order to the collection of things that make up our lives. An external spatial order is an ordering of ourselves in relation to others, such as the public or landscape. The two are interlinked; “In our search for a home, we give our interior home order an exterior context”. 11 Architecture is concerned with the resolution of interior and exterior spatial orders. Frampton cites Loos as having first posed the question in a Modern context; “how to combine the comfort and informality of the Arts and Crafts plan with the asperities of geometrical, if not Neo-Classical, form?”12 Venturi13 does not see this as a Modern problem, only one which Modernism is incapable of dealing with. He gives examples of the “eventful exception” in fenestration, always within an ordered or symmetrical form, such as at Mount Vernon (Fig. 3)14 He does not cite any Modern examples of a facade that successfully reconciles inside and outside while maintaining the complexities of the circumstantial program in the way the Doge’s Palace does or the chapel wing at Versailles. This may be due, in part, to Le Corbusier’s “free facade” which meant that from 1929 onwards there was a complete seperation between inside and outside. By the seperation of the elements of a building into parts, each performing a different function, one need no longer relate to the other, structure became independent of facade (Fig. 4). The complexities of modern living internally were realised in the “free plan” while externally the facade of the building increasingly moved toward a mass-produced envelope, such as the glazed curtain-wall, or toward symbolism. 9. Wright and the Destruction of the Box, H. Allen Brooks, from the book Writings on Wright, originally from the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38, March 1979, pp. 7-14. 10. A psychology of building : how we shape and experience our structured spaces; Glenn Robert Lym; Imprint Englewood Cliffs ; London : Prentice-Hall, 1980. p. 57 11. Lym, Ibid., p. 48 12. Modern Architecture; A Critical History, Frampton, K, fourth ed., 2007, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, p. 158. 13. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi, R., Published by: MoMA, NY, 2002, p. 48 14. Venturi, Ibid., p. 48

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year Fig. 5: The first-floor jardin suspendu. Villa Savoye, Poissy, Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, 1929-31. Fig. 7: Alison and Peter Smithson, House of the Future, Ideal Home Exhibition, Olympia, London. 1955 – 1966.

4. Psychology and Boundary (i) The Body in Space Architecture is the means for defining relationships between things; between inside and outside, architecture and nature, place and space, built and unbuilt. Architecture can either place the body as a participant or as an observer in a particular context. In placing the inhabitant as an observer the architect takes an attitude of supremacy of inside over outside. An example of this can be seen in Le Corbusier’s villas. The purpose of the jardin suspendu (Fig. 5)15 was to create a place from which nature could be observed and the surrounding picturesque landscape surveyed. Placing the inhabitant as participant involves the architecture interacting with the surrounding environment. Kahn attempts this through the idea of relativism and non-dualism (Fig. 6), i.e. a universe made up of mutually exclusive but cogenerate things; “....a means for experiencing that inside and outside are never absolute, always relative to each other; that each architectural space is a partial space: a portion of a greater space from which it has been seperated.”16 (ii) Cell, Court, Domain There is an existential need for bodily shelter and for concentric layers of enclosure. In the writings of Van der Laan he identifies three layers of human enclosure (Fig. 8) in which habitation occurs, the cell, the court and the domain. There are interesting correlations between the degrees of enclosure of space and their sociological implications. In reference to Dunbar’s number17 and the behavioural patterns of groups of people based on anthropological research we can begin to understand the psychology of creating a boundary to house a face-to-face community18 or the desire to create a neighbourhood, which is a difficult task in the reference-based community of cities. Jane Jacobs identifies the danger of creating physical boundaries to demarcate city areas, “It is not boundaries that make a district, but the cross-use and life.”19 Here, we must consider the use of boundaries in the city and their psychological and sociological implications by exploring the work of Alison and Peter Smithson and their Robin Hood Gardens Complex, London (1966-1972).

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(iii) Interior v Exterior: Alison and Peter Smithson Alison and Peter Smithson’s work examines the relationship between interior and exterior space. Their architectural response to this often takes the form of a series of filters leading to an intimate interior space. Thus, their work is the result of a belief in the primacy of the interior over the exterior. It is the layering of spaces from public to private through a series of boundaries until the interior “stress-free-zone” is reached. In the House for the Future (Fig. 7) and the Appliance House an enclosure is established by the external wall and is reinforced internally by a ring of designated spaces, “clothes, dressing, bed, bath.”20 At the centre of the plan there is a protected private space, the heart. It is a graduated series of things in things or enclosures within enclosures, characteristic of temples and churches. (iv) Robin Hood Gardens The theme for the Robin Hood Gardens Housing Complex (Appendix 2) was protection. In fulfilling this, they applied the ideas embodied in their earlier experimental work, the importance of privacy of the interior, on a large scale. The outside chaos of the busy site is mediated through four layers of enclosure until the “calm centre” is reached. The first layer being the boundary wall, acting as the first sound barrier. Secondly, the access decks to the apartments diffuse external noise with domestic noise. Internal circulation within the individual apartments acts as the third buffer. Finally, the bedrooms, the quietest rooms in the house, face internally onto the protected garden. Balconies from the bedrooms further extend the private space of the house into the protected garden. In essence, Robin Hood Gardens is a fortification, “the pressures of the external world are held off by the buildings and outworks.” Its only connections to the “external world” are visual, points on a skyline (Fig. 9). The success or failure of the Robin Hood Gardens Complex in it’s ambition to “protect” its inhabitants through architecture can be assessed in terms of its sociological and psychological implications. The current debate as to the future of the complex, which is in danger of demolition, has led to an investigation of it as a lived reality. The theme of protection is still evident in recent descriptions; the complex is surrounded by a ring of forbidding

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concrete walls tilted outward to block out noise. Just beyond this ring, ramps lead to underground parking, forming a kind of moat between the buildings and the street.21 The journalist of this article visits the complex and in her description compliments the beauty of the interior spaces and the spatial complexity of the living units. The problem, it would seem, is that in an effort to protect it’s inhabitants, the Robin Hood Garden complex becomes a fortress. The exterior is shunned for an idealised interior, a utopian island as depicted by Sir. Thomas More. A utopia, in reality, depends on a degree of limitation where the exterior becomes a method for excluding rather than mediating between the Public and the Private Realm.

15. Modern Architecture; A Critical History, Frampton, K, fourth ed., 2007, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, Chapter 17; Le Corbusier and the Esprit Nouveau 190731, p. 158. Originally from; Precisions sur un etat present de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (1930), Le Corbusier. 16. Louis Kahn and the Thoughtful Making of Spaces; The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space, Michael Merrill, Lars Muller Publishers, 2010, Switzerland. P. 161 17. Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. 18. A psychology of building : how we shape and experience our structured spaces; Glenn Robert Lym; Imprint Englewood Cliffs ; London : Prentice-Hall, 1980 19. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, Vintage Books, NY, 1961, p. 132 20. The Charged Void: Architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson, The Mónacelli Press, New York, 2001. 21. Rethinking postwar design in london, Nicolai Ouroussoff , Article In The Ny Times, Published: March 18, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/arts/ design/19robi.htm

Fig. 6: Relativism between building and nature. Dominican Motherhouse, Kahn, plan 1967. Fig 8: Dom Hans van der Lann, threefold demarcation of space, in De architectonische ruimte, 1977 Fig. 9: Diagram of visual connections of the people to their district. Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London, 1966-1972. Fig. 10: Protection: axonometric from the north-west. Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London, 1966-1972.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year Fig 11: Representing Freedom, Superstudio, Fundamental Acts: Life, Supersurface, 1973. Fig. 12: The Jeffersonian Grid, View of Savvanah as it stood the 29th March 1734. Fig. 13: Google Earth Image of Iowa landscape, 2012.

5. Representing Boundary/ Freedom (i) From Jefferson to Superstudio - the Cartesian Grid Superstudio represents a 1960’s desire to eliminate all hierarchy and to create an architectural landscape in which man could be free. Superstudio engaged in three areas of research; the monument, the image and the technological. The conclusion of this research was a totalizing monumental architecture in which an egalitarian society could live. “The architecture of the image” became a platform for extensive visual experimentation into techniques and appliques, appropriating from diverse sources, such as collage, pop art, cinema and dada.22 The world is represented as an abstract Cartesian grid where objects have no meaning (Fig. 11). A world in which architecture is not separate from life but becomes intrinsic to it. It was the representation of this free society, the image or the ideal, that became the lasting influence of Superstudio’s work. This same desire, as expressed by Superstudio, for a free society in a rationally organised monumental structure can be seen in the division of land in eighteenth century America. “....The absolute status of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of centre, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but – more importantly, its hostility to narrative....”23 Where the ideology is the same, the representation of freedom differs (Fig. 12). Both seek to order the world according to principles of equality and freedom. Could it then be assessed that the logical conclusion of a Superstudio world would be the field patterns of Western America (Fig. 13)? Again, it is a question of the ideal and the real and the literal translation of the ideal into a physical world, regardless of the idiosyncrasies of life. In Colin Rowe’s critique of Superstudio he challenges the term freedom; “that insistence upon total freedom is to deny the small approximate freedoms which are all that, historically, have been available and are probably all that we can ever anticipate?”24. 22. Superstudio – Life Without Objects, Lang, P., and Menking, W., Published by; Skira Editore, Italy, 2003. “Only Architecture Will Be Our Lives”, p. 16 23. Within and Without; essays on territory and the interior, Mark Pimlott, episode publishers, Rotterdam 2007. p. 67 24. Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London, 1983, After the Millenium, p. 47. First published;1978.

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To apply this to the Jeffersonian grid and the New World that it symbolised is to understand that it represented freedom for a particular group of people, not all, and this may be seen as the essential quality of freedom, it is exclusionary. It is based on having a boundary, and every boundary has an inside and an outside. An example of where this principle is embraced architecturally is in Koolhaas and Zenghelis’s ‘‘Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture’’ (Fig. 14-15). It is most poignantly stated in literature by Edmund Burke; “Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed”25 6. Architecture and Boundary: Louis Kahn (i) Border-Space The architecture of Louis Kahn is concerned with the creation and manipulation of boundary, ideologically and tectonically. For the purposes of this investigation, it is interesting to study Kahn’s work as the mediator between two generations of thought on the creation of bounded space. He mediates between a Beaux-Arts classical romanticism for the architectural monumentality of Greece and Rome and the modern movement’s experimentation with new materials and their use in creating light-weight and expansive structures that captured space in a new way. “In Gothic times, architects built in solid stones. Now we can build with hollow stones.” He realised that depth could be virtual and set out to redefine the modernist membrane as the shaper of a spatial layer, in a process he described as “wrapping ruins around buildings”. This concept of creating solid through void, “captured air”26, in the border-space (Fig. 16) between realms is a key theme throughout Kahn’s work. By the mid- 1950’s Kahn and Venturi27 were in agreement that the greatest poverty of modern architecture was the reduction of the wall to its basic climatic necessity. (ii) Form – the Ideal Kahn saw architecture as being a twofold process; that of form and design. Form being the ideal condition, having nothing to do with circumstancial conditions. In architecture, form characterizes a harmony of spaces good for a certain activity of man. Design involves a process of applying circumstances to that form, the real

to the ideal, circumstances such as; budget, site, client, extent of knowledge, etc. Design is the realization of form in response to particular conditions and circumstances.

Fig. 14: Prologue (exerpt) from Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, London, 1972. Fig. 15: Axonometric of the 'strip', Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, London, 1972

A search for form is essentially a search for “meaning”, it is an attempt to find the root human inspiration behind that program. Form is the search for “man’s commonality” or “man’s sense of appropriateness”, found in either intuition or an embodied knowledge of human history. As such, design is Kahn’s means of questioning the basic human need that created the institution, whether “house”, “school”, “library”, etc. Kahn’s search for form through human history leads to the exploration of archetypical forms or “basic modes of being-inthe-world”. The form of an institution defines the hierarchial and reciprocal relationships between its activities. Form generates a spatial order to which all further decisions must be referred. “Design” then confronts this form with a reality (budget, site, materials, building codes, etc.). The “form” either holds “true” against these tests or a new “form” diagram must be conceived. In this way, Kahn’s method of designing situated itself between the two poles of Modernism, between the “Ideal” and the “Real”. (iii) Design – the Real Structure, the measurable and the laws of gravity were at the heart of Kahn’s definition of the architect. He took great care in the detailing and tectonic properties of his buildings. His earlier structural experiments are highly influenced by Buckminster Fuller and the manipulation of new materials. In his project for Philadelphia City, Kahn28 challenges the Modernist skyscraper 25. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke, E., 1790. World Classics Ed., 1950. p. 109 26. The term was coined by the Smithsons in 1960 in relation to Kahn’s Adler House. Quote from Alison and Peter Smithson in Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been, p. 298. Originally published in The Architect’s Yearbook, 1960 27. Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out – The Dominican Motherhouse and the Patient Search for Architecture, Merril, M., Lare Muller Publishers, Germany, 2010. P. 82. Originally from; Robert Venturi, “Ideas of Reconcilitation in Architectural Composition,” proposal sent to John Entenza of the Graham Foundation, February 15, 1962, p. 10. Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. 28. Designed with Ann Tyng, 1952-57. Modern Architecture, a critical history, K Frampton, Thames & Hudson, London, Fourth Edition, 2007, p. 244-245. 29. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi, R., Published by: MoMA, NY, 2002, p. 50

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with a geodesic structure, stabilized by tetra-hedronal concrete floors. Here, Kahn aims to reveal the diagonal bracing of the Modern skyscraper in a structural honesty which he cannot see in Mies’ and Johnson’s work, describing their Seagram building as “a beautiful lady with hidden corsets” (Fig. 17). However, in Kahn’s constant dialectic between the functional and the expressive, in this case the expressive triumphs at the expense of the functional vertical elements of elevator and usuable ground space.29 It was only in Kahn’s mature work that the functional and the expressive synthesised to create architectural wholes. 7. Case Study: The Dominican Motherhouse The Dominican Motherhouse (Appendix 3) is chosen as a case study to illustrate the points made in this dissertation. Through its ideology the Dominicans represent a community with a very particular definition of freedom. The organisation of the sisters’ way of life is based on defined areas of activity. The architect, Louis Kahn, devises a form for this way of life that involves creating a boundary between the pubic and the private realm of the Motherhouse. The case study serves to illustrate the creation of the real from the ideal, attaining freedom through boundary. (i) Background The Dominican Congregation of St. Catherine de Ricci was formed in 1880 outside New York as a convent and laywomen’s retreat house. The congregation grew rapidly in its first few decades and new congregations were established in Philadelphia and Cuba by 1900. In 1964, after their aging convent failed to meet new fire safety regulations, the congregation was forced to look for a new home. The sisters bought a country estate in Pennsylvania and began to settle in. However, their congregation was experiencing a hugh increase in popularity and soon their new home could no longer cater for the crowd. It was decided to build a new motherhouse on the estate. At the time, Kahn had just completed the First Unitarian Church in Rochester (1959-63) and, based on this, he was chosen as the architect for the sisters new motherhouse.

and contemplation. In this way, it is different from other Orders, such as the Carmelites, in which contemplation and solitude are their own ends. There is a dualism inherent in the Dominican way of life where apparently contradictory virtues are brought together, such as, “gentleness and energy, love of study with love of action, genius for contemplation with the spirit of organisation.”30 On this basis, the building for the congregation had to be conceived as a building for a community of people, fundamentally egalitarian, maintaining a delicate balance between thought and action. Also, the life of the Dominican Sister (or Brother) is one dedicated to voluntary poverty. The building to house the Sisters must acknowledge this core principle. (ii) Form: Program The program for the motherhouse was one encompassing the “double life” of the sisters. On the one hand, their private life in the dorms and, on the other, their communal and public life. The form of the building took its initial bearings from these twin realms. Kahn believed that the programming of a building was an open-ended dialogue between client and architect. In searching for a form, the architect must understand the reasons for the program, he/she must strip away all the layers of cultural detritus and search for the essence of the institution. In the search for a form for the Dominican Motherhouse, Kahn reduced the sisters’ program to its essentials. Initial schemes describe a form similar to a medieval Carthusian Monastery. He asserted that “Form” does not belong to anyone, no more than “the waltz belongs to any musician or oxygen to the discoverer of that element.” 31 Instead, he believed that in searching for a form the architect uncovers a “certain nature” and that nature for the Dominican Motherhouse echoed the nature discovered by the medieval monks in the search

30. Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out – The Dominican Motherhouse and the Patient Search for Architecture, Merril, M., Lare Muller Publishers, Germany, 2010. P. 106 31. Merril, Ibid., p. 36 32. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi, R., Published by: MoMA, NY, 2002, p. 16 33. Louis Kahn and the Thoughtful Making of Spaces; The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space, Michael Merrill, Lars Muller Publishers, 2010, Switzerland. (“The twin phenomenon of inside and outside – “Dichotomous Things” or the theme of reciprocity” p. 145 – 179)

The type of order in question became the sounding board for the various phases of the design. The Dominican life is one of action

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for a form for their monasteries (Fig. 18). (iii) Design: An “Architecture of Connection” Initial schemes presented an elaborate system of arcades and ambulatories showing a myriad of interfaces and types of possible relationships between spaces. From the beginning there was a strong idea about the cloisters, the raison d’etre of the organisation in Kahn’s inital romantic view of monastic life. However, the sisters were dissatisfied with this over-emphasis on the contemplation side of their existence and the disjunction between their voluntary poverty and these extravagant arcades. Kahn came to the realisation that a modern monastic life involved spirituality in everyday activities and so the cloisters became the buildings. By integrating the cloisters within the program of the building, Kahn celebrated the circulation through the Monastery (Fig. 19). Offering the occupant many choices of routes through the building in order to get to a destination and not just in the horizontal direction but also in the vertical. The final plan has twelve different stairs giving the building a labyrinthine quality,

Fig. 16: Border – Space: An initial sketch section through the cell and cloister of the Dominican Motherhouse, Kahn, 1966. Fig. 17: Between the functional and the expressive: Seagram Building, Mies and Johnson (left) and Project for an Office Tower, Philadelphia. Model. Kahn (right).

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not unlike a Piranesi drawing (Fig. 20). (iv) Assessment The final design of the Dominican Motherhouse represents a deep investigation of the boundary between the public and the private world of the sisters. Beginning quite literally as one world seperated from another (Fig. 21), the design morphed into a final plan that saw one world harbouring the other (Fig. 22). Kahn’s form diagram of a monastery was seriously called into question in the process of the design. In the end, the functional generated a more intricate and complex design that testifies to the ambiguity of life. Life is not a figure-ground pattern of black and white, but lies in the grey area between the two, this is what makes life interesting, a medieval street layout rather than a classical one, or as Venturi put it, “I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning.”32 In judging whether Kahn was true to his “Form” in the “Design” of the Motherhouse, we can only conclude that the ideal found its own order through a process of design involving collage and re-working the plan. An idea about how the sisters’ would live permeated the entire process and to this unmeasurable end the measurable was attained. Although the final plan of August 1968 appears as a random collision of bodies in space there is an underlying geometrical order that gives rigour to the plan. The orthogonal arrangement of the cells finds its closure in the geometrically in-line entrance tower. Within this unfinished rectangle, the communal rooms of the monastery ‘float’. In this arrangement, the Motherhouse is an example of contained intricacy, one geometry contains another creating a tension in their collision. Here, we can see that one of the elements of “design” is the architect’s knowledge. The plan is a porous pattern of solid and void, a Gestalt plan which may be attributed to Kahn’s Beaux-Arts education. Gestalt psychology involves the representation and perception of virtual depth and its spatial application, for example in figure ground, aswell as in the perception of boundary. “There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.”33 The final plan of the Dominican Motherhouse represents this in its series of communal rooms assembled within an orthogonal space consolidated with a system of circulation devised to give the monastery the feeling of a “big house”.

Fig. 18: First scheme for the Dominican Motherhouse as an interpretation of Kahn's form diagram of the sisters' Mónastic life. Fig. 19-20: Kahn's “architecture of connection” has a labyrinthine quality. Atmospheric plan of Motherhouse (left), Piranesi drawing (right).

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The over-arching theme in the circulation of the Motherhouse is choice, a freedom to partake in some or all of the Monasteries activities. Here, one can clearly see Kahn’s defiance of the Modernist prescribed circulation route and the conception of space as a series of “zones”. It could be said that there is an emphasis today on the “zone” and not on the space between the “zones”, things bleed or blur into each other leading to a lack of definition between things, emphasis on the interfaces rather than on the journey, leading to a disconnection in the space-time continuum (similar in experience to the London Underground). For Kahn, the journey is everything, the connection between one space and another and the freedom to make that choice. Perhaps choice is the ultimate freedom.

Superstudio’s project for “The Continuous Monument” in which architecture leads to nowhere but itself, internalising an ideal society and externalizing reality. Thus, in creating freedom we are creating an enclosure around that freedom, into which some may enter and others are kept outside, into which certain aspects of life are admitted and others excluded. (iii) In some form or another, the desire for freedom leads to a desire for architectural monumentality. (iv) The ideal is distinct from the real as form becomes design and freedom defines boundary.

8. Conclusion (i) All architecture is essentially political, it projects or concretizes a way of life. This dissertation began as an analysis of boundary in architecture. It began as an analysis of the physical condition that seperated one thing from another and the various ways this could be manipulated. However, as the enquiry deepened the question “why?” became more important than “how?” It is clear that there is a reason behind every boundary. The reason is almost always to limit or extend freedom. This is true of every civilization from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Each has its own model of freedom expressed in its boundaries; for example: “....for Le Corbusier, society obliges everyman to fulfil his personal and productive capacities and find nobility within a context of rigid hierarchy and administrative control....” 34 (ii) Freedom must have boundary. A boundary has an inside and an outside. Therefore, a fundamental condition of freedom is exclusion. The exclusionary nature of a built utopia is clearly evident in the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens Complex. Here, the boundary protects the idealised interior life while ignoring the complexities of the exterior world. A similar nature of exclusion is prevalent in 34. Within and Without; essays on territory and the interior, Mark Pimlott, episode publishers, Rotterdam 2007. Picturing Fictions, p. 57.

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Fig. 21: Initial schemes where the communal rooms are seperated from the cells. Fig. 22: Sketch showing how one world began to find a home in the other. Fig. 23: Architecture and a way of life; a nun in her cell.

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References (i) Images 1: Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London, 1983, Utopia: Decline and Fall? p. 12. First published;1978. 2: Wright and the Destruction of the Box, H. Allen Brooks, from the book Writings on Wright. 3: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, R. Venturi, Published by; The Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2nd ed. 2007, Chapter 7 “Contradiction Adapted”, p. 71 4: First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s & 1970s, Ed. By: Steele, B., and de Canales, F.G., AA Publications, London, 2009. p. 6 5: Modern Architecture; A Critical History, Frampton, K, fourth ed., 2007, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, Chapter 17; Le Corbusier and the Esprit Nouveau 190731, p. 158, ill. 142. 6: Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out – The Dominican Motherhouse and the Patient Search for Architecture, Merril, M., Lare Muller Publishers, Germany, 2010. P. 106, ill. 91. 7: The Charged Void: Architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson, The Mónacelli Press, New York, 2001. p. 164 8: Louis Kahn and the Thoughtful Making of Spaces; The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space, Michael Merrill, Lars Muller Publishers, 2010, Switzerland. P. 168, ill. 153-55 9: Smithson, Ibid., p. 298. 10: Smithson, Ibid., p. 304. 11: Superstudio – Life Without Objects, Lang, P., and Menking, W., Published by; Skira Editore, Italy, 2003. “Superexistence: Life and Death”, p. 178-179 12: Within and Without; essays on territory and the interior, Mark Pimlott, episode publishers, Rotterdam 2007. p. 63 13: Google Earth [online]. Available at: http://maps.google.ie/ Accessed on: 8th January 2012. 14: First Works, op.cit., p. 187. 15: First Works, Ibid., p. 188. 16: Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out, op.cit., p. 80, ill. 66. 17: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi, R., Published by: MoMA, NY, 2002, p. 50, ill. 74 – 75. 18: Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out, op.cit., p. 45 19: Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out, Ibid., p. 143, ill. 126. 20: Piranesi, Carceri, the Prisons. Image available online at: <http://archi-ethan. blogspot.com/2010/05/contemporary-art.html> Accessed on: 8th January 2012. 21. Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out, op.cit., p. 65, ill. 54. 22. Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out, Ibid., p. 99, ill. 83. 23. Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out, Ibid., p. 87, ill. 71. 11. Bibliography Louis Kahn and the Thoughtful Making of Spaces; The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space, Michael Merrill, Lars Muller Publishers, 2010, Switzerland. (“The twin phenomenon of inside and outside – “Dichotomous Things” or the theme of reciprocity” p. 145 – 179) Gestalt Psychology; The Definitive Statement of the Gestalt Theory, Wolfgang Kohler, Liveright Publishing, New York, 1970. (Chapter VI; “The Characteristics of Organized Entities” p. 173) The Craftsman, Richard Sennett, Penguin, America, 2008. The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958) (Section II, Ch. 4 10, “The Public and the Private Realm”, p. 22 – 73)

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, Vintage Books, NY, 1961 Articulations, Herman Hertzberger, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002 The Charged Void: Architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson, The Mónacelli Press, New York, 2001. (Ch. 7 “Layers of Fabric, Layers of Meaning”, Ch. 11 “Interval”, Ch. 15 “Outside Inside”.) The Situationist City, Simon Sadler, MIT Press, USA, 1998 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, R. Venturi, Published by; The Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2nd ed. 2007, Chapter 9 “The Inside and the Outside”, p. 70 Within and Without; essays on territory and the interior, Mark Pimlott, episode publishers, Rotterdam 2007 Wright and the Destruction of the Box, H. Allen Brooks, from the book Writings on Wright Blurred zones : investigations of the interstitial : Eisenman Architects, 1988-1998 Peter Eisenman; Mónacelli Press; NY; 2002 Boundaries/Networks, William J. Mitchell, essay first appeared in Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 7-17. Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London. A psychology of building : how we shape and experience our

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EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

With a growing demand for peat briquettes, to be used both as a domestic and industrial fuel in the 1950’s, Bord na Móna set out to extensively research peat pressing in specially commissioned factories around Ireland. In a changing economic and industrial environment the demand for new technologies and solutions for this wasteland is ever present. Through research into new technologies and using education as a method of rehabilitating the land, the aim of the following projects focuses on the potential of the boglands to adapt to use as new land and in energy production.

Photograph by Kristen Klinefelter

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Jewellery & Goldsmithing School Olivia Hillery

The bog is an ambiguous boundary - it is neither solid nor liquid but exists in an ambiguous state between the two. Time plays an important role in the bogs constantly shifting boundaries between land and water. These boundaries will change once again when Bord na Móna finish peat harvesting. Forty-one per cent of Bord na Móna land is artificially drained and will flood once the drainage pumps are turned off post peat-production. This project investigates the potential of this future wetland landscape of the post-production boglands. Ireland has a rich history of inhabited wetlands, such as crannogs and the lake dwellings of early Ireland. This project draws on these examples as a precedent for future wetland living. For centuries, the bogs have acted as natural boundaries in the landscape and because of this they held a special symbolism in early Ireland becoming a place to deposit precious objects for ritual or sacrifice. The National Museum of Ireland holds one of Europe’s most important pre-historic gold collections, the majority of it discovered in boglands. The brief for the project is a Jewellery and Goldsmithing School and it draws on the rich archaeology of the area and the boglands to revive lost traditions. The site for the project was chosen from a detailed analysis of the archaeology of the area. The area around the site has been inhabited for over four and a half thousand years. This settlement landscape involves numerous habitation and ritual sites on the hills surrounding the bog. The research led to the discovery of a Bronze Age Stone Enclosure in the centre of the bog, recently discovered, it is of significant archaeological importance as it is the first stone construction discovered in boglands. The stone enclosure is currently being preserved in-situ by Bord

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(above) Development drawings of scheme. (right) Section through main space.

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Relationship between human habitation & the flooded boglands.

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na M贸na and will exist as a mound of peat in the bog when peat production finishes and the bog returns to its natural wetland state. This project retains these fragments of the past and adds another layer of occupation to that area of ground. The project deals with the ambiguous nature of the ground. The ground level has changed over time - being built up by peat formation for over two thousand years and then being eroded by Bord na M贸na through peat harvesting. An interest arose in this idea of constantly shifting ground planes and the action of time on the landscape. Constructing a ground plane became an opportunity to embrace this ambiguity and to integrate this into the building. The building deals with ambiguity in a number of places. Firstly, in how the building touches the ground, secondly, in how the building embraces a flooding ground plane and thirdly, in the seperation of structure and skin.

(left) Development drawing of plan.

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Director’s House

School & Public Area Student’s Acommodation

Programmatic Diagram 1 How the building meets the ground 2 Occupation of spaces

(above) Programmatic Diagram. 1 How the building meets the ground. 2 Occupation of spaces. (right) Section through occupied space.

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Education and Research Boglands

Innovation Centre Grace Counihan

The project’s objective is to provide a space/setting for the nurture of a community of scholars, from various academic fields, to come together for the benefit of society with one common goal/ objective of sustainable progression, living within the laws of an essential beneficial body culture, which ensures a healthy mind in a healthy body. The pooling of ideas among students, with a common goal, is proven to be of great value as research shows that truth prevails from argument among friends and cross learning can unlock rigid ways of thinking.

In a time of economic uncertainty, entrepreneurs are the key to unlocking the secrets of what we have and what we can do. This campus provides an environment which facilitates young minds in their search to uncover the potential of the post industrial bog lands in Ireland.

The students provide Board na Móna with a diverse range of options which they can choose to fund and be a part of in the hope of turning not just a profit from the land but also in showcasing Ireland at the forefront of innovation and proving our self-sufficiency on the global market.

It is a competitive environment connected to the economic market where the best ideas can receive grants from the government and land from Bord na Móna for a share in the business that they come up with. (below) Overall Aerial View

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07 ARCHITECTURE AND STRUCTURE

-Section

(above) Interior view (middle) Ground Floor Plan (below) Section

SECTION C - C SCALE 1/1 00

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Education and Research Boglands

First Floor Plan

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Cookery School Alen Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Farrell

The Cookery School will cater for up to 40 students. There are three teaching kitchens, an exhibition kitchen, four workshop areas for individual cooking and a large dining room for communal meals.

The project begins by creating a piece of high ground in the Bog.

This piece of ground is protected by a wall creating the walled garden.

The wall expands in areas to become rooms or buildings of the Cookery School.

As the ground around the walled garden expands the accretion of rooms within the wall continues.

More ground is added creating islands of productive land around the walled garden. Becoming Garden within the wall and Garden without

The garden within is about protection while the garden without is about harvesting.

As more ground is produced is grows out from the walled garden, the heart of the project.

The walled garden has a greenhouse on the north wall taking advantage of south light and the thermal mass of the wall on its north side. The entrance and reception area is formed from a thickening of the south wall and provides access to the internal route through the wall to all parts of the school. The Walled garden is sealed off from the rest of the school with one entrance through each of the south, east, west and north walls.

(above) Development of plan Making Ground

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The accretion of wall and ground continues until the amount of land and buildings required for the school to function is achieved..

Education and Research Boglands

School for the Culinary Arts Derrygreenagh

School 1. Walled Garden 2. Entrance 3. Reception / Office 4. Exhibition Kitchen 5. Classroomsl 6. Glasshouses/Growing Area Workshops 7. Workshop 1 8. Workshop 2 9. Workshop 3 Accomodation 10. Accomodation 11. Dining Hall

Productive Landscape 12. Vegetable Gardens 13. Orchard 14. Water Collection Pond

Site Plan Scale 1:200

6 7

8 9 5

(above) Connection points

12 10 4

(above) Plan of Cookery School (left) Perspective of school with highlighted connections.

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Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Projects

Adaptation of Derrinlough Briquette Factory Ruth Hynes

Completed in 1959, Derrinlough Briquette Factory was one of two factories built to meet a growing demand for briquettes in the 1950s as both industrial and domestic fuel. The second in Derrygreenagh boglands was dismantled in 2007. The German engineering company Buckau Wolfe was commissioned to build the factory following extensive research into peat pressing in the Experimental Station of Bord na Móna. The briquette factory was commissioned in 1956 and funded by the Guinness family. The factory consists of two buildings connected by a series of conveyors. A large cast in-situ concrete building contains the blending bunker and packaging facilities for the briquettes. The briquettes are pressed in a smaller and taller vertical factory. Constructed from a steel frame with brick infill and aluminium framed windows, it was designed to house specific machinery in a factory that celebrated the industrial advances being made, and Ireland’s drive to self-sufficiency. After construction, several groups from Russia, Germany and Canada came to view how the industrialisation of mechanical peat harvesting was accommodated. The addition of the factory brought great employment to the area and was a particularly large and tall building. The local paper described the event as "Cosmopolitan swagger has arrived in Offaly".

Derrinlough Briquette Factory

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"Buildings and monuments constitute a system of signs which we read into ourselves... They take us in and we take them in, first as imprints on the retinas, then as known dwellings, then as remembered forms. They begin to insist themselves into our consciousness as a kind of language which, like any language, embodies certain values and enforces certain ways of knowing reality." Seamus Heaney Derrinlough briquette factory occupies a space in the landscape along a prominent route, acting as a landmark. Its visual verticality in a horizontal landscape provides a point of reference within this rural context. Operating and staffed twenty-four hours, it is visible day and night. Briquette factory is viewed as the physical representation or monument of the productive landscape, Bord na M贸na bogland. A study of this monument in a changing economic and industrial environment, with an aim to adapt

(above) Axonometric of building. (right) Model and 3d of insertion.

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Bioremediation & Phytromediation Research Institute Eoghan Considine

The building being proposed is a Bioremediation & Phytoremediation Research Institute. The building will provide facilities for research into sustainable and environmentally friendly technology of using plants and bacteria to decontaminate land. The Maze Prison in Northern Ireland has to be decontaminated at the cost of ÂŁ8.5 million. The land on this site has been completely destroyed by chemicals and metals. This, like many areas in the bog, are ruined landscapes. After researching soil decontamination in Ireland, it became clear that there are currently three main types of remediation in use; extraction, capping and soil washing. None of these methods are sustainable. When soil is extracted it is simply removed from the site to a designated dump and the problem is not taken care of. With capping the problem is merely covered over. With soil washing, the land again becomes inhabitable but this comes at a great cost and it also leaves the soil void of all nutrients and unable to sustain growth. Through further research, it was discovered that an alternative to these methods was phytoremediation, the use of plants. This is currently used in the likes of reed beds but not at a larger scale for larger areas of land. It is not a new technique, but it is not one that has been fully explored. Through the project it was decided that this technology could be further researched. As phytoremediation could not deal with chlorine based contaminants it was to be partnered with bioremediation. It was from this building type and the research into the required processes that the site was selected and the program was constructed.

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(below) Plan and section of building. (right) Section through the different layers of the bog.

Photograph by Shane Morgan

Dublin School of Architecture Thesis Year

Ends, Means and Meanings Johanna Cleary

Is the human species by existing at all jeopardizing nature? (image:The Guardian 2010)

As creative people we have the ability to construct realities for others to inhabit, to help shape cultural narratives and inform the way we collectively think about the world (Young & Davies, p. 7). The words ethic and aesthetic linked by a variety of conjunctions bound a field of architectural enquiry now well-trodden. Reyner Banham’s book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (1966) frames the question specifically in relation to a post-war neoavant-garde movement, in a bid to establish whether the Brutalist ethos represented “a moral crusade for reform of architecture or just another style.” (Parnell) In this particular encounter Banham declares aesthetics the victor: “for all its brave talk of ‘an ethic, not an aesthetic,’ Brutalism never quite broke out of the aesthetic frame of reference.” Over the next 40 years the ethics/aesthetics debate reflected emerging post-modern thought, moving from modernist oppositions and polarities to a more nuanced, subtler relationship between the two combatants, as at the 2000 Venice Biennale Less Aesthetics, More Ethics. This attempt to find new ways to relate to architecture, exploring new ethical responses, rather than simply aesthetics, when developing a project. However, in an increasingly uneasy ecological context beset by global warming conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers and technophobes. In 2012, the thesis unit at the Dublin School of Architecture once again borrowed the twin engines of ethics and aesthetics, this time to survey, map and analyse the contested terrain of the Irish bog system. We suspected we might tap new sources of Architectural knowledge, precisely because the very act of engaging with this landscape demanded a priori ethical and aesthetical speculation. We carry the sinking desperation of a species cornered by its own short sightedness. We are young and fucked (Bennett). Perhaps our young graduates concur with this lament uttered by the organisers of the Pacific Students of Architecture Congress in 2007. Many of us will concur “as humans working in and around the discipline of architecture (where) it is proving difficult to

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know how to act in this globalized multi-cultured world.” As Augé suggests “never before have the reference points for collective identification been so unstable. The individual production of meaning is thus more necessary than ever” (Auge, p. 30). Aristotle described ethos as “that fibre in man which reveals choice, what sort of a thing a man chooses or avoids when the choice is not obvious.” Ethos is constructed as attitudes and aspirations influence choice and as outcomes feed back into a fluctuating ethical field. In the absence of comforting certainties and obvious choices, the thesis unit sought to move beyond despair at the ecological context, wherein the “human species by existing at all is jeopardizing nature” (Oosterman, p. 3). The postdespair thought contained in the collection of essays After Zero paints the cult of sustainability (institutionalised even in 1987 by the UN report Our Common Future) as a dangerous, catch-all, consensus and suggests that as an uncritical construct it acts as a “cover-up for complicated ethical questions about inequalities in our societies” (Oosterman, p. 1). This sharp sacrilegious challenge to the globally accepted sacred cow, or is it ‘plastic panda’, of sustainability illustrates the difficulty we have when speculating on our environment. There is an equally valid life for humanity beyond guilt, shame and despair to a life of co-existence, a vital architectural practice that doesn’t “stop us dancing and having fun” (Bennett). Amid global uncertainty and ecological urgency we value an Architecture capable of engaging in the political dimension of space and able to encompass the relationship between the artificial and the natural, between the human and the non-human and between ethics and aesthetics. In a time when beauty has become utterly contentious (Beech, p. 12-19), the thesis work proposes fresh and surprising ideas on the utility of aesthetics. Within the work shown, moral and philosophical ideas co-exist with beauty. The work by Murray, Browne, O’Toole, Flanagan and Forester contains ethical observations about land, man and infrastructure and exists in the fertile ground between culture,

Essay Boglands

nature and technology. The work suggests new relationships between people and their environment and synthesises of ecological and architectural values. Work by O’Brien grapples with complicated ethical questions about inequalities in our society. His work is theoretically advanced and reflects a view that human guilt and debt can be used as productive forces to confront the big challenges of the planet. Along with Morgan’s server farm which conceives a mesh of connections between the virtual world and the physicality of location, and Gallagher’s bogland cemetery, this work demonstrates that context is a complex interweaving of factors way beyond the site as landscape, a plurality of visible and invisible voices. Density and optimisation of food production and consumption frame the thesis propositions of Gleeson and Coffey where the desire for widely available local and organic food is critiqued. The contentious debate on food consumption and land use that idealizes a co-existence of efficiency and fairness is interpreted through efficient, spatial and technological manipulation that suggests new architectural knowledge, significant beyond the immediate thesis context. Conclusion: Philosophy (or speculative thought), if defined as the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence, is inseparable from architectural thought. It is from this questioning that beautiful ideas emerge in a contested world. The philosopher Jacques Rancière argues one must pay “unconditional attention to one’s intellectual acts” (Ranciere, p. 37) and bring this same intelligence to bear on the conquest of new territories. As architects we engage with “the interconnected nature of a complicated planet, to acknowledge these complexities, ask difficult questions and speculate on possible answers” (Young & Davies, p. 14). This remains an aspiration.

If teaching is an art, it is the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. Then viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control. Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must favour us if we are to reach it (Smith, 2012). By refusing to limit our enquiry to the polarity between ethics and aesthetics, but rather proposing morality and beauty “fold one over the other as if they were equivalents” (Gutting) we hope beauty may be found at the point of tension between the individual and society. We may not know yet if we have been successful but the work shown here accepts “that the things we make are surprising and look good is not enough. They will at least have to contain something, an idea that is of some use to the world” (Hertzberger, p. 17).

1. Steven Parnell field: a free journal for architecture vol.4 (1) p.50 2. Reyner Banham The New brutalism:Ethic or Aesthetic (London: The Architectural Press, 1966) p.134 3. Informalize! Essays on the Political Economy of Urban Form Vol.1 Ed Marc Angélil and Rainer Hehl Ruby Press Zurich2012 4. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th c. architecture Ulrich Conrad MIT press Massachusetts 1971 R. Buckminster Fuller: The architect as world planner 5. Guilty Landscapes Volume Archis Spring 2012 Constructive Guilt Arjen Oosterman p.3 6. To Beyond or Not to Be Volume 18 After Zero Arjen Oosterman p.1

Auge, M. (2008). Non-Places An introduction to Supermodernity. London: Verso. Beech, D. (2009). Art and the Politics of Beauty. In Various, Beauty:Documents of Contemporary Art (pp. 12-19). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Bennett, B. (2011, July 5). Congress:Architectural Student Congresses in Australia, New Zealand and PNG: ctrl shift Wellington 2007. Retrieved August 31, 2012, from Projectfreerange: http://www.projectfreerange.com Gutting, G. (2005). Foucault:A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Hertzberger, H. (2002). Articulations. Michigan: Prestel. Oosterman, A. (2008). After Zero. Volume 18:After Zero , 1-3. Oosterman, A. (2012). Constructive Guilt. Volume 31: Guilty Landscapes , 3. Parnell, S. (2011, January). Ethics vs Aesthetics Architectural Design 1965-1972. Retrieved August 31, 2012, from field:a free journal for architecture: http://www. fieldjournal.org Ranciere, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. California: Stanford University Press. Smith, M. E. (2012, May 29). Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Education. Retrieved July 28, 2012, from Infed: http://www.infed.org The Guardian:Eyewitness. (2010, December 7). Retrieved September 3, 2012, from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk Young, L., & Davies, K. (2012, Spring). Unknown Fields. Volume 31:Guilty Landscapes , p. 7.

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Students

Bernard Brennan James Browne Jonathan Buckley Eoin Byrne Naomi Campbell Niamh Chambers Robert Chapman Kevin Coffey Eoghan Considine Jamie Conway Grace Counihan Declan Crowley Aisling Flanagan Emma Forristal Donnchadha Gallagher Luke Gleeson Simon Harrington Edwyn Hickey Olivia Hillery Ruth Hynes Brian Jordan Clare Kilty Maria Larkin Bryan Ledger Paul Maher Courtney McDonnell Aengus Mitchell Shane Morgan Ronan Murray David O’ Brien Mary O’ Brien Alen O’ Farrell Niamh O’ Flaherty Hugh O’ Rourke James O’ Toole Anna Pierce Adrian Rooney Emmet Smith Alex Stupar Elaine Wynne

Staff Dermot Boyd Dominic Stevens

Yearmaster Yearmaster

Johanna Cleary Laura Harty Donal Hickey Janek Ozmin Declan Scullion Marcin Wojcik

Guest Critics Tom de Paor Patrick Ring Simon Walker Michael Haslam Chris Bakkala Edith Blennerkassett Jeff Bolhuis Andrew Brady Noel Brady Geoff Brouder Prof Hugh Campbell John Casey Andrew Clancy James Corbett Sean Creedon Kieran Donnellan Craig Dykers Michelle Fagan Catherine Farrell Patrick Flynn Anna Hofheinz Alan Hooper Lucy Jones Paul Kelly David Kohn

Gary Lysaght Robert Mantho Prof Michael McGarry Shelley McNamara Colm Moore Rae Moore John Piggot Mark O’ Brien Paul O’ Brien Michael O’ Dell ShiFu Peng Patrick Phelan Sima Rouholamin Grainne Shaffery Charles Sutherland Peter Tansey Prof John Tuomey Brian Ward

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